Of course, it is alright to ask questions like:

  • What project do I want to do?
  • What creative field do I want to explore?
  • Who should I approach to learn more?
  • How can I apply this or that to my life?
  • What do I feel like doing?
  • When should I get started?

Those questions and more are fine.  They are about what direction you should follow and commitment of energy, time, and money you should make.  The questioning is fine but….asking the wrong person for advice will get you the wrong answer. The answer you will get is something like this:

  • No, that won’t work out.
  • No, that isn’t the direction for you because_____fill in the blank____
  • No, you can’t do that.
  • No, that’s already been done
  • No, that doesn’t feel right.
  • No, no, no, no.

Ever come home after a day of work and someone asks you if your want to do something? Everything they suggest just doesn’t “feel right.”  Sound familiar?

“Noooo, I don’t want to do that.”
“Well, what about _______? ”
“Noooo, I don’t want to do that.”
” Ok, what the hell do you WANT to do!!!!?????  Just forget it. I give up.”

Our thoughts: “Nothing looks good so I guess I want to do… nothing. Strange.  Usually, I want to do something but…this is weird. Hmmmm.”

Secret:  We have an Inner Rejector who, in summary, hates anything other than sure pleasures, like chocolate sundaes, beach vacations, massages, puppies and kittens, tantalizing images, gossip, impulse buying, chips, and summer breezes.

The pleasure-safety-comfort complex controls us far more  than we realize. Sometimes it stops us and almost always, it is tugging at us.

This complex has the purpose of protecting us from the extremes of:

+ never resting,
+ never slowing down to think before acting,
+ never taking time to smell the roses.

That is the light side of the complex. The dark side gets us to:
– resting too much,
– hanging too loose,
– loving inertia,
– accepting self-doubt as a perpetual condition

As you can see the light-side has a real purpose but, without balance, we can allow the dark side to be the side that is always facing up. We will talk about balance later.

The Inner Rejector is a direct relative of Depression. They link up and Depression gives the feeling tone the Inner Rejector needs to really get going. Now all the pleasures and comfort things and processes that have worked for us before, now those really suck, too. Chips and chocolate are like rotten food and eating cement. A horrible combination, that Inner Rejector and Depression, but they are frequently hanging around.

The Better Choice for Your Questions
We are far better off not asking straight-forward questions because our Inner Rejector will pull them right to itself and fire back, machine gun-like, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

Instead, quietly look around your memory.  Look for clues:

  • what has attracted your attention,
  • what has charmed you,
  • what has fascinated you,
  • what has caused you to take spontaneous or almost spontaneous actions
  • what has given off the air of rightness
  • what have you done in the best of times (and maybe the worst of times)

From this inner archeology, you will get strong but quiet indications of what to do next; where to go; where is likely to be the right fit for you;  how you might approach something or someone; how you can find more resources or, at least, further clues.

Shhh…don’t be too loud. You don’t need perfect information to start something or take your next move. You are not a mind-reader or a sooth-sayer, so stop acting like one, scanning for information you can’t get.  Go with what you got. If you start poking around too much you will make too much noise and stir your Inner Rejector to come on over to “help you out.”  That help sucks.

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