I welcome you to the New Year and hope you all have had the most wonderful of holiday experiences. I'm sure you have all been waiting for Part 2 of my story to come out. Well, here it is.

If you recall from Part 1, I was explaining how, despite my understanding that to change is a choice; I was unable to overcome my own self-talk to get to the changes I wished to make in my life. This unfortunate situation went on until I began to deal with my iron willed focus on myself and to put other people at the center of my attention.

I provided you with the first part of some understandings and disciplines that I am coming to trust with making progress towards positive change. I will reiterate that these are ways that have come to me and are working. And these practices and insights, even if perhaps somewhat different in nature, are very much, I feel, in keeping with the principles and true aims of the Parent Seminar. You may well have another way that is working for you, but I believe the conclusion of this article is universal. In order for your pursuit to be genuine it really must bring you ultimately to this understanding.

But I am still learning about the path to change and have on this journey yet a very long way to travel.

Enjoy!

– John Borland –


Freedom of Choice (Part 2)
By John Borland

Deliver what can be accepted – I have often been asked in my home, “Why do you treat him differently than me?” My answer to this is, “Because he is different than you.”

I used to have a “one-size-fits-all” mentality. I used to apply the same rules to each member of my family and to have the same expectations of each for the perceivable outcomes. No more.

You may disagree with this and I could be wrong, but I have found that because everyone is different I cannot treat my loves ones, or any other people, in exactly the same way.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I do apply generally the same rules and I really do have the same expectations for people. But I am coming to apply those expectations and perceive the outcomes in keeping with the person that I am dealing with, with what he or she can realistically accept and do.

As such, I may on the surface appear to treat different people differently, but my standard for each remains the same.

Become a key to trust – This really goes along with and tends to round out the item above. Yes, as I say above, you should only deliver what a person can accept. This is because only those things that a person can accept and so take in will he or she truly act upon.

But how do you keep this from becoming merely a static and indulgent exercise unto the other? My answer has become to build the trust of that person such that he or she is more able to accept and more willing to do more.

You can ask any member of my family and I am sure they will tell you that I deliver hard stuff and set rather high standards. I have always done this with everyone, but I have not always been effective.

The reason is that, until recently, I was more concerned with gaining the particular outcome than with considering the person with whom I am seeking to gain and what quality of relationship I am building with them.

Trust is the key. By varying my approach – my timing, the amount of challenge I bring, how I bring it, etc. – with a loving eye towards earning trust, I can over time deliver essentially the same hard stuff, but gain much more.

Every person has a wall. Before I could only beat against the wall and so invite the person to make their wall even thicker and stronger. But every person has also within his or her wall a door. How can you make yourself as a key that will fit the lock in the door, open it, and allow you willing entry into that person through their wall?

Listening is a part of doing – A real part of all this is the ability to listen. This entails not only capturing what the person is saying so as to understand his or her point, but also to gauge why the person is saying it so as to understand his or her reason. Needed, therefore, is the ability to genuinely hear the other from the perspective of real interest, compassion and respect.

But a critical quality also lies in being able to hear and accept those reasons from the other that are directed at you.

Too many times I bring too much too fast and too harshly. Often when this happens, even if not spoken in words, the person opposite me will communicate with facial expressions, body language, or with volume or tone of voice his or her feelings towards me. Discernable also within the person and the situation are the reasons for those feelings.

Before I used to feel that I am right and, even if harsh, they must hear me. Now I tend more to ask, “Is this too much? Can I see and accept my part in building this outcome? Can I bow to the other person within their reasons and change what I am doing?”

Teaching beats correcting – For most of my life I have tended to point out to the persons around me what they are doing and attempt to correct their actions. Even when I have done this in gentle ways such efforts have many times been less than effective, and too often even counterproductive.

For one, people don’t react well within a negative, critical environment, particularly when it is aimed at them. Secondly, even if well meaning and done with care, directing others to correct their ways is perceived as intrusive, controlling and demeaning. Even an obedient person who might comply with the direction given will likely feel shame and a certain defensive irritation born of being diminished.

This correcting approach, then, is usually not a means to growth either for the person being corrected or for the person correcting.

We were taught facilitation techniques in the Parent Seminar and I use similar methods in my work, but I have never been exactly comfortable with them in personal settings, as the techniques feel to me somewhat contrived and manipulative.

Rather, I am learning, particularly with my kids, to carefully teach simple, succinct lessons. These I generally give casually and as much as possible apart from any particular situation.

The idea is to neutrally plant a seed that, with prudent watering – via repetition, using varied facilitating approaches – will slowly take root. My hope is that over time, when a situation does arise, the person (i.e., one or the other of my kids) will of himself or herself apply to the situation the lesson now growing inside them.

Example is a good teacher – This piece is an indispensable adjunct to any teaching by word. For what better lesson can you give to your children or anyone than a personal, living example of what you believe?

Now I am not at all what I should be, but I do work very hard these days to show my family and others through my life what it is that I am talking about. And I have to say that this is the best teaching tool of all. I say this because, not only am I teaching those around me, but by application, I am also much better being taught myself.

I must admit in the beginning my efforts at exampling were much more strategy than reality. But as time goes on I am not only living this way to model to them, but because this is how I wish to live.

I have dreamed for so very long of abiding in real peace and love and now slowly it is coming nearer, and the more I live in this way the more it comes to me.

Do people see this change and respond to it? Not really. Rather, this change in me (incomplete though it is) seems to create an environment in which people can feel more open and at ease. People are then attracted to this environment and seem to do better just by being in it. What could be better than that?

Be willing always to forgive and forget – The foundation of peace, of fellowship, of our very humanity lies in our unique and loving ability to forgive one another.

And why should I not forgive my neighbor, for who am I? How many times have I wronged another by acting in ways that are self-serving or insensitive? And how very much do I beg for and even depend on forgiveness being given unto me? If forgiveness forms such a real need in and for me, how can I rightfully deny the same gift to another? How, in fact, can I condemn another to my anger and disdain without also, and first, condemning myself?

But holding on to past transgressions or bearing a grudge towards another is not forgiveness at all, but a continuance of the offense. In truth, it is the real continuing of my own loss.

To paraphrase an ancient elder: each day is a new day, and each day I begin again to work and strive anew. It is as if yesterday never happened and each day is the first day of my life.

Let me always recall this lesson in my personal struggle that I may not succumb to pride or despair; and with the remembrance of my neighbor that I may not hold on to wrath.

See the bigger picture – It is so necessary to be able to visualize beyond your immediate condition. You must believe that a perceived failure is not the end; that if it doesn't happen today it can happen tomorrow; that if it doesn't come about in the way you expect it will turn out by some other means.

The only way I have found for this to occur is to step back from the person or situation in front of me, remove my blinders and dare to see the bigger picture.

The real design is so much more vast than our limited construction of it. Life is not a set of endpoints, but a continuum of education and growth within experiences, challenges, opportunities and changes.

To live rigidly in expectation, to know only what must be, denies all of this continuum and the wonderful options and possibilities that go with it. We cannot be masters of the future, or judges of the outcomes, or centers of the universe since we are only and ever but simple participants in the larger ebb and flow.

To understand this, to submit to your real place in the movement, opens you to all this wonderful reality and fills you with a tremendous and awesome hope for what lies waiting just over the horizon.

Follow your heart – For me this has meant learning to find the open, but secret place of my heart – my simple, inner self – and allowing myself to trust in its messages and direction regardless of what my rational mind, my passionate body, or the frenetic world tries to tell me.

This has meant not doing the many things I used to do, and even believed were necessary, but which go against what my heart truly desires for me. And it has meant doing many other new things that the quiet voice of my heart is calling me to.

For example, I work not to blurt out the words in my mind that are cynical and hurtful, or even witty and self-aggrandizing (the effort now is not to think them). I endeavor to resist anxious impulses, to remain pleasant and to control my tone of voice even when the situation wants me to be and do otherwise. And I am fighting to slow down, reflect from my heart and see the persons standing before me for who they really are – living, feeling, struggling people, and not the inert caricatures I so often try to make them.

My heart, it seems, is connected and has known all along who I really am and what is best for me. Now finally I am listening.

Dare yourself to be – However my dear friends, lest you misunderstand these simple examples, let me say that the true pursuit is not merely to achieve to something better of yourself, as you are and as you can.

Rather the true and real pursuit is to labor everywhere and always to open yourself to the impossible: to believe in the realities that cannot be; to trust in what your eyes cannot see and your mind cannot conceive; to seek release from your fears, your barriers, your nagging doubts, and so dare yourself, like a child, to reach out beyond the known limits of yourself.

In this way you will become, not simply a better form of what you are, but truly and genuinely who you are meant to be.

Look for help – It is a fact that no one can do it all alone, and absolutely no one of us is ever hidden or alone. There are no islands. We are all connected, ultimately visible and always impacting one another in what we think and do.

I believe it is impossible to fully release yourself from the center of your focus and unto change unless you have something larger and outside of yourself in which to believe and place your trust. I know for myself if I did not have faith in an outcome beyond what I can see and in a presence and plan greater and more complete than I can visualize or accomplish of myself I could never have the courage to let go, and so would never really change.

Without seeking to impose upon you let me say by way of example that my faith and increasing trust is in the Lord Jesus Christ and His gift of love, peace and life to those who struggle for Him. I have in this faith the wonderful assistance of a new way of being, new tools for becoming and tremendous role models in the elders, the saints and in He Himself.

Please, understand that nothing I have written here is of my own devising. Rather I am merely following, with difficulty and even resistance, in the train of that which is larger than me on the path to where it leads.

It wasn't always this way for me and the course of my life, walking formerly and rather singly in what I could create of myself, vividly reflects this. Whatever or whoever you choose for your assistance and in which to place your trust it must have the ability and power to lead you where you, of yourself, do not want to go.

In conclusion – What I have written to you here is still so poor in relation to the reality and there are so many more thoughts and aspects that I could include to better flesh this out. But, with regard to change, I hope you can grasp the ideas being presented, see some practical suggestions for moving forward, and understand more clearly the real need to fight against self-focus.

It’s funny, but in writing this article I have discovered that many of the things that Larry teaches in the Parent Seminar and that I said I couldn’t do, I am actually doing. But it has come about uniquely for me in ways that are not Larry's; in ways I really could not predict or produce.

All of this is happening according to my needs, addressing me in my situation where I am. But it is also freeing me to better see and address others personally, in their unique needs and situations where they are.

And now, in closing, there is one remaining but essential point in my list that I very much need to explore with you:

Love is the only answer – Love my dear friends is indeed the only answer. Love is the absolute definition of all true relationships; love is at the center of everything written here; and love, though not an end in itself, is the very gateway to all.

We consider love to be an emotion, and after a fashion it is. But love is also so much more. For love is the only emotion – the only movement I know of – that allows us the wonderful ability, together in unity within it, to transcend beyond our meager human condition.

Love is so very important to us. It forms so much the underlying theme of our thoughts, our beliefs, our philosophies, our language, our music, our literature, and it is without question the fundamental though often hidden desire of each and every one of us.

But we have also tended to confuse and so distort true love (and ourselves in measure) by focusing on love too much through the filters of associated overtones having to do with psychology, physiology, religion, law, duty, romance, sensuality, indulgence, commercialism, protection and manipulation. This is only natural since everything that is not strictly of love, out of ignorance, envy or fear, battles against true love to diminish and defeat it – in short, "Stinkin Thinkin."

Still, love is the only answer and, I believe, the real and higher purpose behind everything we deem to be of value. It is love – and only love – that brings to us the peace and security we all long and cry out for. And this is true even in these modern, perplexed times when we somehow cannot see this to be the case.

Still, love remains the only answer. That true love is not more present in our thinking, our discussions, our problem-solving, our goal setting and our interactions with others is a result of the choices we make to identify, or not, love as our basic need – the only answer – and to work diligently for it relative to our other possible focuses.

As we said at the beginning of this article, everything in life, with the exception of dying, is a choice. And how do you wish to come to that point of dying, when you have no longer a choice?

Do you wish to find yourself both loved and warmly in love because of all you did while in your life to find love and cultivate it?

Or, at the end, will you come instead to cold realization and bitter regret for the lack of love because of all you did while in your life to seek out everything else?

In life we retain always, as a gift, our innate freedom of choice, but I believe we will be responsible for our choices and the consequences of them even unto death.

If you too believe in this reality, is there really any choice?

YOU MAKE THE DIFFERENCE IN WHAT WE CAN DO TOGETHER!

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Last Modified: January 01, 2004