What Motivates You? - Part 1

WHAT MOTIVATES YOU?

As I began to write these next few blogs, I was reflecting on what my program is all about. The purpose of my program, 'Lt. Pacello’s Life Training Program', is to bring a total mind, body, and soul healing modality to those who suffer from PTSD, depression, trauma, or stress.  In order to fully recover from this disorder, it has to be on all levels: mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual.  Why?  The reason is because we exist on 4 different planes of existence.  There’s the mental plane, the emotional plane, the physical plane, and the spiritual plane.  Three of these are unseen: the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual.  The balance and harmony in our lives is based on all 4 of these areas being healthy, functioning properly, and interconnected to all the others.  If the unseen world, the inner world, is out of balance, this will be reflected in the physical world.  It’s not the other way around.  However, when we identify ourselves only as a body, we are at the mercy and effect of the physical world, and as a consequence, we only treat the body for the symptoms we are experiencing and not dealing with the cause.  We limit ourselves to treating the effects of PTSD, depression, and trauma.  

If we just treat the symptoms and the effects of PTSD, depression, and trauma, this is very limiting and short-sighted in dealing with the overall problem.  You’re going to get limited results; you’re going to get short term solutions and coping strategies to deal with this disorder for the rest of your life.  Thus, you might be able to alleviate some of the depression, some of the angst, or anxiety you might feel through some of the skills you develop through counseling, or by taking pharmaceuticals to make you feel better.  However, this does nothing to heal the cause of your pain.  So, the purpose of this program, the program which I offer to each and every one of you who suffers from PTSD, depression, or trauma, is to give you a way, a path, for you to completely heal this within yourselves.  In this program, one of the many things you learn is that mind is the cause; the outside world is the effect.  You are subject to what you hold in mind.  That is crucial for you to understand and what is going to make all the difference in allowing the transformation in your life to occur.  If you are subject to what you hold in your mind, than what you hold is going to influence every aspect of your life.  Our goal is to go to the cause of the pain, shine a light on it, uproot all the belief systems, the traumas, the things that have kept you from being the best version of yourself, and do this in a holistic, healthy, loving way, and bringing in the non-linear context of universal spiritual principles like love, compassion, and forgiveness in looking at the traumas you've experienced; and when you are truly able to do this, you will be able to heal this within yourself completely on all levels.  If you choose to work with me, we are going to remove all the clouds that are covering up the sun that is you that is shining brightly underneath.  All of you are already whole.  You do not need to fix anything.  We just have to remove all those things, those traumas, and pains you've experienced in your life that are preventing you from feeling and being that wholeness.  And that’s what this program is really all about.  It is a complete and total self-healing of your soul distress.

Part of the process to connecting to what motivates you, one of the things you must understand, really grasp, is you are the source of your own happiness.  We get so bogged down by the outside world not giving us what we want, not fulfilling our needs, not fulfilling our desires, and it’s because we've placed the source of our happiness outside of us.  We are often motivated by what we hope to get from someone or something to fill us.  A relationship, for example, can be a source of our happiness.  Yet, by placing the source of our happiness in the other person we are placing ourselves in a very vulnerable position because we are seeking appreciation, acceptance, love, and value from something outside of us, and when the person fails to do so or the relationship doesn't live up to your expectations, you get sad and depressed, or you feel cheated, or feel unworthy of love and belonging, or even worse, unlovable.  

It’s difficult for us to let go of this unconscious program running through our lives.  It's something we were programmed with since birth.  Love is outside of me, not inside of me.  My value and worth is determined by others’ love and acceptance of me, not by me accepting and loving myself.  Nothing outside of you can give you happiness.  You, and only you, are responsible for your own happiness.  

We project onto the world, we project all these things and give it their meaning and value, and when they don’t come through for us, we get angry, we get depressed; we get filled with hopelessness and despair.  This vulnerability to being at the effect of the outside world is a consequence of the way we were taught.  We were taught to believe that if we do these things, we will have these things, and then we will be happy.  For example, if I do this job, then I will be able to have these possessions, and then I will be happy.  As a consequence, we've placed our happiness somewhere out into the future, rather than being happy right now, starting from a place of beingness.  By being happy, starting from a place of being content and satisfied, then we are coming from the place we already want to be, and thus, when we go out and do the things that we want to do, we’re doing it because we truly want to do it, and inevitably, because we are coming from a place of wholeness, we’ll get the things that we truly want.

When we recognize we've placed the source of our happiness as outside of ourselves, we begin to understand how this creates a negative energy field because it is basically a lie.  I want you to really get this right now, you are the source.  You, and I, have mistakenly given our power over to the world, the power to live life to its fullest and to enjoy it, and now it’s time to take back that power.  As a former suffer of PTSD, depression, addiction, and trauma, I can tell you with 100% confidence that your minds have to be re-trained.  You must learn how to re-train your mind to separate yourself from the thoughts that imprison you, and the thoughts that invigorate and inspire you.  This includes all the pain, the flashbacks, the triggers, the fears, the anxiety, the anger, the incessant painful memories that keep recurring.  For me, in my recovery, it was to really grasp and understand the error I had made in placing my happiness outside of me.  Once I understood that the source of my happiness was within me, that I was the source, I was the true source of my motivation, I had to look at things in a completely different way.

Now, in recognizing what motivates you, we begin to re-align to who you truly are.  There are questions which I ask of you when I work with you, which are designed to get you to look very deep within yourselves and find out what is the driving force behind your life?  When we understand what the driving force behind your life is, we understand what motivates you.  And then we really get in touch with who you are; we really get in touch with you.  And then the program moves forward from there, really tailored to you.  When we re-discover what motivates you, we start letting go of the belief systems that keep you from being this person, who you truly are.  And when we understand what motivates you, we begin to heal your pain; we heal your past pain because we connect with the trauma to understand how it occurred and what it means, and how to use that for your own motivation.  That’s why we do it.  And that’s why it’s so important to understand what motivates you.  To change the things in the outer world we must first work on our inner world.

Part 2 tomorrow.

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Do We Come Back to Heal Old Wounds?

REINCARNATION

I want to spend a few minutes with you on reincarnation.  Do our souls really come back in another life form?  Is such a thing plausible?  Do we have any evidence to suggest that maybe this is true?  Socrates talked about the immortality of the soul and how it moves from the spirit world into our world and back again in the dialogue, The Phaedo.  Many philosophers and spiritual masters have spoken to us about the idea that the soul comes back to the earth and takes on another form in order to learn and evolve.  Over 50% of the world’s population believes in reincarnation.  But where is the scientific evidence to support this?

The work of Dr. Ian Stevenson

The most compelling evidence of reincarnation comes from Dr. Ian Stevenson.  He began his research into reincarnation at the University of Virginia around 1960.  He was the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and his work is the best, and most respected, collection of scientific data that appears to give scientific proof of reincarnation.  He investigated the stories of very young children who had memories of previous lives.  He spent 40 years of his life traveling the world and compiling evidence.  He collected over 2500 cases of children making claims, half of which were solved, meaning they had been verified.  He would methodically document the child’s statements of a previous life, and then, he identified the deceased person the child remembered being, and verified the facts of the deceased person’s life that matched the child’s memory.  His studies are scrupulously objective and methodologically impeccable.  I highly suggest you look him up and do the research yourself.  If I thought it was necessary, I'd transcribe excerpts from his books, but the case I am going to discuss next will astound you, and thus, there is no reason to go into other verifiable cases. 

The reincarnation case of James Huston, Jr/James Leininger

In my program, I have a video which vividly depicts the case that reincarnation actually happens, and it involves a boy named James Leininger, who was born April 10, 1998.  This video is from a local news program here in the United States, Fox 8 News.  The story of James has come to us through 4 years of research conducted by his parents, Bruce and Andrea.  For Bruce, this involved a great personal struggle, for the idea of reincarnation conflicted with his beliefs, and by the end, he became a Christian who had accepted reincarnation as a reality.  In the video we learn that: 

• As a small boy, when he was just a toddler, James Leininger had a passion for Japanese warplanes from WWII.  He seemed intimately familiar with the aircraft.  He did drawings of airplanes shooting down other airplanes, bombing ships, men parachuting, etc.
• After turning 2 years of age, James started to experience vivid nightmares that would make him scream from out of his sleep.  His parents would rush in and see him struggling and crying, kicking and clawing on the covers, like he was trapped in an airplane.  James would cry out, “Airplane crash.  Plane on fire.  Little man can’t get out!”  Andrea, his mother, would ask who the little man was in the plane.  James replied, “Me.”
• Both Bruce and Andrea were surprised and impressed with James’s knowledge regarding Japanese WW II aircraft, as they knew he was not learning this information through normal means.  He wasn’t getting this stuff from Sesame Street.  They started asking more detailed questions such as:
• What plane did you fly?  James: Corsair
• Why did your plane crash?  James:  My plane was shot down
• Who shot your plane?  The Japanese
• Where did you take off from?  A Boat
•  Do you remember the name of your boat?  Natoma
•  What is your name?  James (this confused his parents because his name was already         James)
• James was not even potty trained and yet he knew intimate details of World War II.  His father Bruce wanted to disprove all this.  He decided to research the statements made by little James.  He discovered there was indeed a WWII aircraft carrier named the Natoma Bay that had operated in the Pacific during the battle of Iwo Jima.  He tracked down veterans from the USS Natoma Bay, and what they told him was that there was a James Huston Jr who died in the invasion battle of Iwo Jima.  When little James met some of the Natoma Bay veterans, his parents were stunned when we recognized them by name!
• Bruce and Andrea also tracked down James Huston Jr. sister Anne.  They set up a phone call between Anne (who was 84 years old when they contacted her) and little James.  In the conversation, little James knew many personal details of James Huston’s life, which Anne confirmed as accurate.  For example:
• Little James told Anne that he called her Annie.  Anne confirmed that only James Huston called her Annie
• Little James told Anne they had a sister named Ruth, which was correct
• Little James said Ruth was four years older than Anne and that Anne was four years older than James, which was correct
• Little James reported that their father was an alcoholic and smashed things when drunk, and that he had to go into rehab for alcoholism.  Anne corroborated this.
• Anne later sent a picture her mother had painted of James Huston to the younger James.  Little James called Annie to thank her and asked where was the one mom painted of you.  She went and found it, sent a copy, and told Bruce and Andrea, no one in the world except her brother and sister knew there was an identical picture of Annie at the same age.
• Little James was talking about a past life from 50 years before, so there was no way he could have known the details that he came up with.
• The family went to Japan, at the site of where the battle took place.  Without any help, James knew exactly where the plane had crashed.  They held a memorial service and threw flowers over the wreckage.  Little James got very emotional.
• After the memorial, the death and destruction drawings were replaced with dolphins, whales, and the Japanese ships floating with their flags’ raised.  War scenes were no longer depicted.    

What do we learn from this?  That reincarnation is possible.  And what reincarnates?  The essential self.  It should be noted that evidence is not proof, but without question, there is a lot of empirical evidence for reincarnation.  James Huston’s soul reincarnated as James Leininger, and through the diligent and thorough work done by his parents Andrea and Bruce, they helped to heal James of his painful past.  Little James won’t have to repeat his previous life’s history to heal his wounds, and now, he can move on to create something new.  Many of our souls come back to heal old wounds.  And since we are tied in with our families, we come to heal those wounds as well.  Much of what we go through is to heal us from our unremembered past, and when we heal it, we get to move on to the next level of our growth, evolution, and expansion.  But, until we transform it, we continue to re-live the same problems over and over again.  Transforming our pain is the only way to prevent us from repeating history, both on an individual and collective level.  These problems affect individuals, families, and societies, and that’s why it is so important to take the time to heal the pains of your past.  Making peace with your past is one of the most important things you can do to guarantee a better, healthier, and happier present and future.

Exercise:  Whether you believe in reincarnation or not is always going to be a subjective decision.  You are going to believe what you believe to be true, and our beliefs often stand in the way of our own ability to see things in a different way.  Often, the best way to utilize the information I've just presented is to use your imagination while remembering your dreams as a child.  So, for an exercise, I want you to go back and remember your childhood and reflect back on the things you loved doing.  What were your dreams as a kid?  What were your focuses?  What did you come in already knowing?  Some of us at a very young age were musically inclined and could sing or play an instrument with relative ease, as if we had this talent give to us by God.  Others were fascinated by building things, or airplanes, or cars, and naturally gravitated towards those interests and seemed to just have a curiosity or knowledge or fascination about these particular areas of interest.  Others loved to draw or paint; or imagined themselves as being superheroes, or feeling deeply connected to nature, any number of things.  Why were you drawn to those things?  We all have natural inclinations that, if we look deep enough, we had some kind of knowledge about that that is beyond any rational explanation.  What were they for you?  Finally, when you've answered all of these questions for yourself, I want you to use your imagination to the following questions:  What if you had a past life?  Who would you have been and why?  The purpose of this exercise is to expand your mind and look at yourself in a new way.  Chances are that after doing these exercises, you will see how expansive you really are, and re-discover the nobility that lives within you.  We identify with those who are a reflection of our own inner nature.  See your own nature in others, and you will see it within you.      

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Understanding the Nature of Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability - Brene Brown - Conclusion - Part 4

GUILT AND SHAME CANNOT SURVIVE EMPATHY

What do we do to numb?  Addictions.  This can occur in a variety of forms: alcohol or drug abuse; high-risk sex; gambling; compulsive exercise or work; or repeatedly getting involved in emotionally or physically abusive relationships.  These are just a few examples.  We make the uncertain, certain.  Religion was a beautiful mystery of spirit infusing all of life, and there are many different pathways to the same God, however, we've come to a situation in our society and our world where my way is right, your way is wrong, and if you don’t follow my way, I’m going to kill you.  Our beliefs have become so restrictive and limiting, we don’t allow ourselves to open up to something bigger and more inclusive.  Instead, we believe we are right, and if you’re with us, we like you, you’re our friends, and if you don’t, you’re against us, and therefore, you are our enemy.  We also use blame as a way to discharge the pain and discomfort of guilt and shame.  The playwright Moliere in his play Tartuffe writes, “Those who have the most guilt and shame, are the first ones to accuse and blame.”  Blame is a method we employ to avoid facing what needs to be faced.  Another thing we do is we ‘perfect’, which doesn't work.  We get plastic surgery; we obsess over our bodies; we attempt to control the behaviors of the people in our world, because we see others in our world as a reflection of who we are, and if they are perfect, that must mean I am perfect; we do this to our children, and instead of giving them nurturing, love, and the tools to empower them to meet the challenges they will inevitably face in life, we try to make them these perfect little boys and girls.  And when they don’t measure up to our expectations of them, they are likely to experience emotional and psychological damage.  

Lastly, we pretend.  We pretend that what we do does not affect other people.  It does.  All of life is connected.  Plants give off oxygen which we need to breathe, and we exhale carbon dioxide which the plants need to live.  At the molecular level, the atomic soup of all living things is carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen.  This is found in every living thing you see: a butterfly’s wing, a parrot’s beak, a lion’s tooth, a leaf of a tree, and in you.  What we do affects all of life, because we are a part of life and life is a part of us.  Whenever you hurt another human being, imagine a sword right above your head, and whenever you strike out from your pain, that sword is reaching down and striking you.  What you do to others is what you do to yourself.   There is only one of us.  All of these things by themselves or used in combination prevent us from being real and authentic with the people in our lives.

Shame keeps us doing the same things over and over again because our souls want to heal from this pain.  The soul wants to be united with love, the love that it is, and the love that it shares with every living thing.  Anything that is not love will come up to be healed and transformed, if we recognize that this is what the soul is doing.  

So, how do we eliminate shame?  How do we eliminate guilt?  First of all, we must give ourselves permission to truly be seen.  We must be transparent; otherwise we are living in secrecy and hiding the things we don’t want others to see.  Our society has taught us it is better to lie about ourselves than to be open and honest with the people in our lives.  Everyone has at one time withheld the truth because it was our impression this would keep us safe and protected from the judgment and accusations of others that we are bad or wrong for feeling this way, which would then keep us from feeling love and connection.  I’m declaring this is wrong minded thinking.  It is better to speak the truth of who you are than to live a lie in order for people to like and love you.  Those who truly love you will love you more because of the courage you showed by opening up your heart to them honestly and truthfully.  Those who find fault or judge you harshly, are coming from a mind that doesn't understand what it means to live authentically, and the courage it takes to reveal the secrets that you hold.  Let them go, with acceptance, grace, and dignity, knowing the right people will come into your world who will accept you exactly as you are.  Truth plus transparency along with unconditional love equals healed.  You have to allow yourself to be seen by those with whom you can tell your story whole-heartedly to without being shamed for it or judged. 

Another thing to do to eliminate shame is to love with your whole heart, even though there is no guarantee you will receive love back.  You've got to go out into the world and love.  Be love.  As many people have said before, you can only give what you have, and thus, in order to give love, you must be love; you must recognize the love that is already inside of you and give it away.  It will come back to you, in some way, in another form; your job is to be what it is you want to experience.  You also want to practice gratitude, joy, and seeing the goodness and abundance in your life.  When you are able to see the good things in your life, which are right there in front of you just asking to be seen, you will slowly but surely pull yourself out of the prison house of shame.  Life is not all dark.  See the light, be drawn by the light, and light will infuse your world.  You call into your life what it is you want to see and experience.  Along with the desire to experience the light, you've got to feel that you are worthy of good things, that you are enough.  No one can give you what you already have.  No one outside of you can make you feel worthy, it comes from you.  You have everything inside of you right now.  Stop running away from the things you need to face.  Face it; with love, compassion, and understanding, and you’ll be able to free yourself from the guilt, shame, and pain of your past.

What do we learn from the Brene Brown video and from the analysis presented in these last 4 blogs?  If we don’t look at our guilt and shame, it will keep us in a place that doesn't allow us to be the fullest expression of who we are capable of being.  Guilt and shame imprisons us, binds our spirits, and holds us down at the mercy of our past actions and behaviors.  Guilt and shame is hell.  There is no other hell than that.  However, guilt and shame cannot survive empathy.  And when you find it within yourself to be truly honest, and to look at those places, re-contextualize those events and those experiences, to extract the gold from the dark, to pull out the things which are of value in your life, you will see that these were lessons for you to learn and grow so that you may become the person you are capable of becoming.  Without those experiences, you wouldn't be able to bring to the world what you were intended to bring into it.

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Understanding the Nature of Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability - Brene Brown - Part 3

VULNERABILITY

Vulnerability is at the core of shame, of fear, of guilt, and of self-hatred; and the struggle for love and belonging.  However, as Brene Brown points out, it is also the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging, and love.  If vulnerability is the birthplace of all those emotions that we truly cherish, then it is so vitally important to be tender and kind to ourselves, and to those around us.  Love begets more love, fear begets more fear.  It can be no other way.  When we give ourselves permission to be vulnerable, we give ourselves a chance to experience life from a place of wholeness, because we are not afraid of letting ourselves be seen.  This takes true courage, and the reward for living from this place, is you live from a place of true authenticity.  You are authentically you.

Why is it so difficult for us to be vulnerable?  For one thing, we numb vulnerability.  We don’t allow ourselves to live in vulnerability, which is about being in touch with who you are and with your feelings and emotions.  Human beings are unique in the animal kingdom because we think and we feel.  Feelings can make us feel very vulnerable and at the same time, make life so worth living.  Can you imagine what life would be like without feelings?  All the color and majesty of life would be stripped away; we wouldn't know what the sun on our skin felt like, the taste of an apple, the smell of a rose, or the tenderness of a kiss.  We wouldn't feel pain, but we also wouldn't feel joy either.  We live in a world of opposites.  This is how mankind learns – in contrasts, and it’s no different with feelings.  But we reject our negative feelings because we fear them, and what we fear, controls and dominates our lives. 

So what is it that we are so afraid of?  We are afraid of rejection.  We live in a very vulnerable world.  One moment you have a job, and the next, you've just been laid off.  Bills are piling up that you don’t know how you are going to pay.  A relationship turns sour and you don’t know if you will ever be able to love again.  Because there are so many areas of our lives where we feel threatened, or have experienced tragedy, we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable and feel those negative emotions.  It’s the only way, we believe, we can protect ourselves and our livelihood from the cold, cruel world.  What ends up happening is, instead of giving ourselves the permission to experience the negative emotions associated with a traumatic event, we numb it.  But you can’t selectively numb your emotions.  

So, this is what you do.  You think to yourself, ‘I’m not going to feel these negative emotions, it’s just too painful’.  Well, at this point, your mind employs unconscious coping strategies to drown out these toxic feelings.  For example: you go out and medicate yourself and/or engage in addictive or self-destructive behaviors; you sleep too much; you use tv, reading, or hobbies to distract you and numb out; you work compulsively at unrewarding jobs; you binge on any of the above activities when things get tough; you take out your anger and frustration by getting into fights with your loved ones; or you keep repeating painful experiences over and over again.  These are just a few ways people who have experienced trauma deal with the trauma in their lives.  Why do we do this?  

These deep seated emotions of guilt and shame are like poisons to our soul, and our soul wants to get rid of it.  It wants to be purged of all that is toxic to its well-being.  But when we numb our emotions, it’s like we put a plug on the wound hoping this will solve the problem.  It does temporarily, but like water in a plugged up pipe in your house, if you don’t clear it up, it will burst, and the mess you have to clean up later is much worse than if you just cleaned it up when you first noticed the problem.

By numbing your negative emotions, you also numb your capacity to feel love, your capacity to feel joy, and your capacity to feel good.  Life is seen through lenses that are fogged up, because your emotions are clogged up and your mind is stuck in the painful experiences of the past.  Behind all these negative feelings and emotions, are all the good feelings and emotions we want to experience: gratitude, joy, love, happiness, and authentic connection.  What ends up happening is when we don’t feel good, when we don’t feel happy, we feel miserable, and then, we’re not finding the meaning and purpose in our lives we desire, we feel despair, we feel hopeless, we feel like our lives are going nowhere, and so what do we do, we repeat the same cycle all over again.  We start drinking, we do drugs, we medicate ourselves all over again, and this becomes a dangerous cycle.  If we could just go back to the original trauma, the original place where the error occurred, and atoned for that error and heal it within ourselves, we can unravel all that we've done to ourselves to bury the pain of the experience.  We make it worse and compound the problem by employing all these other ways in which we try to cope.


Part 4, the last in this series, tomorrow.

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Understanding the Nature of Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability - The Work of Brene Brown - Part 2

WE HAVE TO ALLOW OURSELVES TO BE SEEN

In order for us to connect to others, we have to allow ourselves to be seen.  We have to give ourselves permission to show others who we really are without fear of being rejected or shamed because it is the only way we will be able to have a true authentic connection with another human being.  We have to feel worthy of connection.  Now, this is what shame boils down to: am I worthy of love, belonging, and connection?  To feel shame is to believe you are not worthy.  The opposite of shame is worthiness.  So how do you get a sense of worthiness, a deep feeling of being worthy of belonging, love, and connection?  The key is to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to speak your truth without guilt, shame, anger, or blame, and to trust that your willingness to be totally transparent, will foster the conditions to bring the truth of who you are out for all those to see.

Brene Brown talks about whole-hearted people.  Whole-hearted people feel they are worthy of connection, and have a strong sense of who they are, regardless of what other people might be saying about them.  Brown describes four characteristics of whole-hearted people: courage, compassion, connection, and vulnerability.  Courage is often confused with bravery.  One of the ways our culture has defined courage is the inner strength to face your fears, which is often equated with standing on the battlefield in the front line facing a barrage of artillery, witnessing and partaking in the horrors of battle.  This is bravery.  Courage comes from the Latin, and its etymological root is ‘of the heart.’  Hence, the true meaning of courage is to tell your story of who you are with your whole heart.  That’s what courage is. 

Whole-hearted people are able to speak the story of who they are with their whole heart.  They’re able to speak all their imperfections, their insecurities, their self-doubts, and they’re able to do that with a sense of love about themselves, and recognition of their own limitations.  Our ego-minds have a tendency to infect how we perceive ourselves. If we are not as “perfect” as our ego mind directs us to be, then, we will believe on some level, whether we are conscious of this or not, that we are not good.  Whole-hearted people do not have this conundrum.  They recognize that life is a journey; they are imperfect by nature, which gives them permission to grow and learn from their mistakes and errors consciously without the burden of the excessive weight of guilt and shame.  We can only become the people we are capable of becoming by learning from our mistakes.  If we don’t allow ourselves to learn from our mistakes, and get stuck in guilt and shame, we impede the process of our evolution.

Compassion is the understanding or empathy for the suffering of others.  Whole-hearted people have compassion for themselves, for others, and recognize their own humanity.  They have let go of anything they thought they were supposed to be, or should be, so that they could be who they are.  This enables you to have true connection with someone because you are not hiding anything.  You are showing your strengths, your weaknesses, all of it.  By allowing yourself to be truly seen, you miraculously get this deep connection we’re all searching for, but what’s unique about this kind of connection, allowing yourself to be that vulnerable, is it is authentic.  You have an authentic connection to another human being.  You’re not hiding anything, you’re not covering up anything, you’re not deceiving anybody, and thus you’re opening yourself up to be who you truly are, the whole of you. 

People who are whole-hearted fully embrace their vulnerability.  It’s not something they run away from, cowering in fear, worried about what others might think of them.  They are not afraid of losing love because they know the source of their love is inside them.  They believe their vulnerability is what makes them beautiful.  To be vulnerable is to be fully open to life, to be fully alive, and is characterized by the willingness to embrace all that life has to offer.  So, whole-hearted people forgive easily, not because the other person deserves it, but because they deserve peace.  They will be the first ones to say, ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I love you’, because they know there are no guarantees in life; they recognize the transience of the material world, and will find out and cultivate what is truly most important.  It is not material things or grievances which are of value to the whole-hearted person.  ‘Love holds no grievances’ as A Course in Miracles says.  You cannot love someone and at the same time, hold a grievance against them.  These are contradictory impulses, and deny the holder of these impulses with the ability to see past the ‘sins’ of the other to the beauty that is in them.  

All you see when you hold a grievance is the sinner, the unforgivable sinner who deserves punishment by you.  They may have done something in the past that was wrong, and the wrong may need to be addressed, but there is a difference in how you do it.  When you do it from a place of love, you respect the person who stands before you, you recognize the error they committed is not who they really are, that in that moment they fell asleep to who they truly are, and behaved in ways that were hurtful.  But you can’t solve a problem on the same level that it occurred.  You must rise up above the pain, anger, and desire for revenge, and seek what is noble in you.  When you seek what is noble in you, and act from that place of self-love and self-respect, you will begin the process of transcending the event which has caused you so much pain.  Trust in this process, and I promise you, you will see the person you hold a grievance against transform, you will no longer be holding them hostage to their past, and you and they will eventually be free from the past completely.

Tomorrow, Part 3.

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Understanding the Nature of Guilt, Shame, and Vulnerability - Part 1

GUILT, SHAME, AND VULNERABILITY

One of the things you learn in my program is that mind is the cause; the observable world is the effect.  Perception is a mirror, not a fact, and what you look on is your state of mind reflected outward.  Now, in order for us to completely heal from our past, we have to understand the nature of guilt, shame, and vulnerability.  It is something that people who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and trauma are constantly fighting against, which is the regrettable memories of their past.  The things they wish they would have done differently, the things that they feel are unforgivable, that they can’t free themselves from and are imprisoned by.  Guilt and shame is a preoccupation with sin.  Sin has been used over the centuries in order to manipulate and control people and keep them down.  Religion has turned something that was intended to be used in guiding one’s conscience in order to do well and learn from one’s mistakes, and perverted the understanding to keep them in fear of God, in fear of eternal damnation, and so, as a consequence, they've been able to keep people in control through the use and manipulation of guilt and shame.

 

Sin actually is an archery term; it means ‘you missed the mark.’  It’s really about learning from your mistakes.  What sin has become is an exaggerated fear of eternal damnation.  If we sin, and God condemns us for our sins, our souls will live in the fires of hell for all eternity.  This idea has so embedded itself into our unconscious minds that we often punish ourselves in the present moment for the ‘sins’ we've made in this life before God has even passed any kind of judgment against us, and then, because we see ourselves as unforgivable sinners, we continue to do things that bring us pain, which only strengthens the idea that we are sinners, we are bad, and we are going to hell.  It’s a vicious cycle we do to ourselves without us even being aware of it.  The lives of people who suffer from guilt and shame, by virtue of these unconscious negative beliefs, can be so tortured and debilitating that one’s life is completely altered because of the things they have yet to learn from. 

So what is the nature of guilt and shame?  Guilt is ‘I've done something bad and I should feel bad about it.’  Shame is ‘I've done something bad and therefore, I am bad.’  Shame is total despair, an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness, life has lost all its meaning, and there is a feeling that our errors are totally unforgivable and we will never be able to recover from it.  It is the total imprisonment of one’s self.  Shame is the lowest energy of the universe.  Someone who is so self-absorbed into their own shame cannot see how they will ever extricate themselves from the place in their lives they find themselves in.  Guilt is intimately connected with shame.  Guilt can be turned inward or guilt can be turned outward.  Guilt turned inward is self-violence; you are committing violence towards yourself.  Guilt provokes rage.   So let’s say you are guilty of doing something, or having done something, or having experienced something, and if you are non-violent, you will turn the rage that guilt provokes against yourself, and this shows up as ‘I’m not good enough, I don’t deserve this, I’m a failure, I’m not worthy, etc.’  If you are prone to violence, acting out from your pain, and projecting hatred out, you will put it ‘out there’, and then seek the means for revenge and retaliation.  That’s how guilt manifests itself.  Guilt is “the consequence of the memory of regretted past actions as they are recalled.” (Hawkins, p. 51).  What you feel is that what you have done is so bad, and what follows are the self-punitive judgments you make about your past actions. ‘I don’t deserve to have anything, I’m not worthy of anything, I’m not love-able, I’m a worthless worm in the face of God or the Universe, in the face of all my friends and loved ones’, and what pins this all together is the belief you don’t deserve to have any good and you are completely unforgivable. 

Guilt and shame have been exploited by people in position of power throughout mankind’s history to keep man down, in fear and trepidation for the welfare of his soul, and trapped in the tragedies of the past.  I’m saying to all of you, who are reading this blog; you can break free from your past!  What I want you to know is guilt is something that ages you and will make you sick.  It will show up in your body if you don’t change it and heal it.  It can be changed, it can be re-contextualized, and it can be used as a means to re-calibrate your life and your story, which helps you to make peace with your past.  PTSD and trauma suffers must learn how to overcome and transcend their guilt and shame. 

The foremost authority and expert on guilt and shame is Dr. Brene Brown, who spent ten years researching the nature of guilt, shame, and vulnerability.  Her research is a part of my program and we watch a video where she goes into detail about what she uncovered and discovered through her years of collecting data and information regarding this topic.  I’m going to share with you what’s in the video, what the meaning in it is, and what I got out of it.

Brene Brown begins by talking about connection.  The reason why we are here on this planet is to connect with others.  We want to connect with them physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.  When we have connection with others, this gives us the meaning and purpose in our lives we so deeply cherish.  If we have connection, to others, to ourselves, to all of life, our lives become imbued and filled with meaning and purpose.  We are neurobiologically programmed to feel connected to others.  When we experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or trauma from a traumatic event, whether it is war, physical abuse, emotional abuse, accidents, disasters, etc., we feel disconnected from life; we have been disconnected from connection. 

What unravels that connection is the shame.  This shame is the fear and disconnection that there is something wrong about me.  And that if others know and see this thing inside of me, what I've done, what happened to me, what I experienced, then I won’t be worthy of any connection.  This deeply rooted fear is something we all have, this is not an ‘American’ issue, this is universal.  The only ones who don’t have this fear are those who are sociopathic, who have no empathy whatsoever, who are unable to feel compassion for others, and therefore cannot connect to people on an emotional level. 

We don’t want to talk about this stuff.  No one wants to talk about their shame, no one wants to talk about their guilt, because we have been taught to suppress it.  This is the dark, ugly side of us we should avoid and separate ourselves from.  Hence, we project these unwanted qualities within us out into the world and they become our shadow figures and theses shadow figures are the things we hate about ourselves, and when we see it in others, we end up hating that quality in them.  When we project it out into the world, it can lead to violence and the acting out of our repressed desires to destroy that which we hate in them, which is really about us.  However, this doesn’t produce the desired effect of eliminating that which we loathe, and instead, what happens is our acts of violence only create more violence. 

“If you don’t talk about your shame and guilt, there’s a good chance you got it.  And the less you talk about it, the more you got it.”  Brene Brown points out that shame is lethal, it will destroy you.  As she defines it, shame is “the profound sense that you are unworthy of love and belonging.”  If you don’t feel you are deserving of love and belonging, you won’t survive.  Aristotle said that we are social by nature, thus, if we don’t feel like we belong, that is as good as death.  We may be alive, but we are dead inside.

Now, what holds this idea of shame together is the idea that ‘I’m not enough, I’m not good enough, I don’t deserve to have good things, I’m such a sinner that I don’t deserve to have the good things life has to offer’.  This idea makes us feel extraordinarily, excruciatingly vulnerable, and as a consequence, we can feel immense despair and total hopelessness of ever being able to connect again to another human being.  This state of existence can be overwhelmingly painful to the sufferer because of the deeply held unconscious fear associated with the total absence of love, which is fundamental to our existence.  

A momentary aside before I continue with the work of Brene Brown as I evaluate my own experience with guilt and shame.  I descended to the very depths of my own hell, thrust down by the heavy weight of all my past, and went through what is often called, ‘the Dark Night of the Soul’.  Now that I have fully recovered and come out the other side, I have some new understandings substantiated by personal experience.  Our greatest fear is not death.  It is the total and complete loss of love, a state of absolute lovelessness, where we have been separated from love.  This is equivalent to a total separation from God, for if God is Love, and love is the binding force of the entire universe, then if we reach the state of total separation, we must be unworthy of love, God has abandoned us, and for this we either must miserably die or savagely retaliate against love.  In my opinion, this is the source of evil.  As A Course In Miracles states, "Love cannot give evil, and what is not happiness is evil."  But that’s another discussion for a future time.

Part 2 next week.


References:

1.  Hawkins, David R., M.D., Ph.D. Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Stairway to Enlightenment.  Veritas Publishing; 1st Edition, 2006.
2.  A Course In Miracles, Workbook for Students.  Course in Miracles Society, Omaha, NE.  2008
3.  Dr. Brene Brown video, TED Talk, 2010. 

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD, Depression, and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com

Freedom from Depression

In light of the Robin Williams tragedy, and having experienced severe chronic depression and suicidal contemplation throughout much of my adult life after my time in the military, I feel compelled to tell you a bit of my story during the darkest times with my battle with depression, PTSD, and trauma.  It is my hope and intention that what I share will be healing for those who might be battling their own personal demons and feel there is no way out.  Some of the things I will share in the next few blogs are very dark, and are not suitable for children.  I am exposing my demons to you, and thus I ask that you please read this first before any young children read it.  By sharing my battle with my inner demons, I hope it will serve to stop someone who might be thinking of ending their life, and get some help.  Getting help was the best decision I've ever made.  It helped me to find the joy for my life once again.


Depression

One of the most common consequences of someone who has experienced Post-Traumatic Soul Distress or trauma in their lives is the experience of depression.  Depression is something we all have experienced at least once in our lives.  It's very common.  It can be traced back to ancient biblical times.  Depression is as common as man has been on this earth.  In the energy field of depression, we view ourselves and the world as sad and hopeless; a place of sin and immeasurable, unending suffering; and our view of God or Source is someone who doesn't love us, who ignores us; who has no feelings for us, is uncaring, and who we feel separated from and abandoned by.  Essentially, at its core, we feel separated from life.  The most common feelings associated with depression are self-blame, self-loathing, guilt, shame, and worthlessness.  In addition, a sufferer of depression feels powerless to do anything about his condition or effect positive changes in the world he lives in that might change his perspective.  He feels total hopelessness and despair that his life, and life in general, has no meaning and no purpose.  There are many regrets about the past.  There are paralyzing fears about the future. Attached to both of these are the feelings of guilt and anger.  Depression can be described as anger turned inward.

What happens is we project what gives us value and what gives us meaning as outside of ourselves.  We place value and significance on other people, on our families, on our jobs or careers, on our possessions, and things which are transitory in nature.  We give away our power to these "outside things" because we believe they will give us the love, recognition, validation, and identity we need, and thus imbue our lives with meaning and purpose.  This, we believe, will give us the connection we want.  A depressed person is not able to make this connection.  When the outside sources of their happiness has failed them or been lost to the regrettable past, whether it's a person, place, or thing, the internal emptiness one feels can be so overwhelming it's crippling.  The sufferer can become so incredibly despondent where he is barely able to function, all is dark, his life force completely drained, and he has no will to live.  The future is gone, and what he lost, can never be replaced or replicated, it's gone forever.  This perceived lack and total separation from life can be so detrimental to the point where the person feels the only way to extricate himself from this excruciating pain is to commit suicide.  To feel separated from that which we want is to unconsciously feel separated from God as our Source.  We are totally separated from the source of our happiness.

For most of my life, I was sad and depressed.  As a child, I was quiet, shy, gentle, and sad.  That doesn't mean I didn't have good times; I did, I have many, many beautiful memories from my childhood and adolescence, my battle with depression doesn't negate or take away from any of those times, they were the times I lived for.  However, as I grew older, I began increasingly feeling more sad, lonely and depressed, never quite measuring up in my mind to the people around me, always seeing others outside of myself as being happier, more content, having a better life.

It's not like I wanted to be depressed.  Depressed people know they're depressed, and they know no one wants to be around someone who is depressed all the time.  It's depressing.  When family or others take notice something is wrong, you try to pretend nothing is wrong, because you don't want to burden them with your feelings about your life or your relationship to the world.  You put on a mask to the world that everything is fine, but inside you're in the dark.  You feel everyone's pain around you, and take it on as your own, which depresses you even more.  Something inside of you knows something is not right, something is terribly wrong with the way the world operates, and how you operate, and you feel helpless to do anything about it.

By the time I was an officer in the Air Force, I was suffering from chronic depression, it was plaguing my life, and nothing I was doing offered any escape from the sense of hopelessness and despair I felt.  And then, I experienced my trauma by working on the GPS/NDS program.  I was in charge of the operational readiness and capability of these mobile ground units that would only be used for Integrated Tactical Warning/Attack Assessment and Nuclear Force Management.  End-to-end nuclear war.  Under my leadership, my team and I executed all mission essential testing which resulted in full operational acceptance and turnover of a new system - a first for the NDS survivable ground mission.  You can find all this stuff on my Officer Performance Reports, so nothing I am telling you is classified.

I remember the moment my soul was wounded by the work I was engaged in.  I was sitting in one of these units doing some testing with one of our contractors, and as I was sitting there, I looked around, and imagined what would be happening if this machine was actually being used.  There would be all out nuclear war.  Life on earth, as we know it, would be over.  And I had contributed my life in service to our nation to ultimately see to its destruction.  I saw images of nuclear bombs going off; I saw the people using this machine that I and my team had made operational and ready to conduct the war, and it made me sick.  I remember a big knot in my stomach as these and other thoughts consumed my mind, and I said to myself, 'This is not what I signed up for.  I wanted to preserve, protect, and defend our nation.  Not participate in the planning for the destruction and annihilation of mankind.'  I received a deep, moral, spiritual wound in that moment.  We all want to contribute something to this world.  That what I did served a higher purpose, it added to the continuity of life, and made life better.  No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't see how what I was doing served any higher purpose.  To me, it was premeditated mass murder.  And there was nothing I could do to change what I believed at the time was the inevitable outcome of the work I contributed my life and talents to.  My soul revolted.  And my depression about the future of humanity reached new depths never before experienced.  I sought to 'numb out', and, as I will explain later in another blog, that is exactly what I did.

Depressed people literally have depressed cells.  Happy people have happy ones.  And the reason why we are depressed is because we have placed the source of our happiness as being outside of ourselves.  There is an internal emptiness inside so deep and pervasive, nothing seems to satisfy this perceived lack - you can see the beauty on the outside, but not inside.  There is this intolerable feeling that we have built up a veil of morality on a amoral reality.  Nothing is as it should be; violence, death, and destruction rule this realm, and all we can do is stand up to it as best we can.  For some of us, this is too much to bear, and we medicate ourselves or consider suicide as the only option to free ourselves from the suffering.  I'm sharing with you my personal experience with PTSD and depression; others may have a different experience with it, but the essence is the same.

Beneath these disturbing thoughts and feelings I was having about my life and the world I lived in was all the pain, the loneliness, the hopelessness, and despair of my life that I carried with me from the genetic and historical transmission of trauma passed down to me through my father and mother.  Traumas get passed down through the generations.  It's not anybody's fault.  We are all innocent at birth, and the world we are brought into gives us the experiences we have.  Whatever is not consciously contained by one generation gets passed down which then necessarily and largely unconsciously plays itself out through the next generation.

I was completely unconscious of what was going on with me on the inside, in my inner world.  I didn't know why I was always depressed.  I didn't know why I felt the way I did, I didn't know why I couldn't seem to fit in, I didn't know why I felt so disconnected to all of life and the people around me, I didn't know where this pain came from or why it came to me.  Of course, I didn't show it, or let anyone know I was so severely depressed because I didn't want to seem weak or unmanly.  As a matter of fact, I put on the opposite face, the happy party guy, to cover up what was really going on.  But by putting on a face and burying the pain I felt on the inside only made things exponentially worse.  I didn't have the tools or resources at that time to face my depression and everything else that was in me that needed to be faced and healed.  Instead, I coped with my depression and my traumas, by 'drowning out my sorrows' through alcohol and later drugs.

I want to conclude this by suggesting depression might be our friend.  If looked at in the right way, perhaps this is nature's way, or our own psychology's way, or God's way of pointing out to us that something is not right in the way we see our life.  And, it's my belief now, after years of battling with depression, it is our psychological, biological, and spiritual way of putting on the brakes and addressing that within us that needs to be re-examined.  It's as if our own soul is saying to us, "Please look at this.  Please understand me out of your compassion.  Just love me.  Heal me, heal all of it."  When we address the fear underlying the depression, we give ourselves a chance to finally be free of it.  Having the courage to look at what is depressing us with the eyes of compassion and non-judgment, having the intention to at least look at the subject as promising and hopeful, changes our relationship to depression.  We are no longer at the mercy of it.  We know it is trying to teach us something.  It wants us to come back to ourselves and be the source of our own happiness regardless of the circumstances on the outside.  And, if we can look at it and discover that "there is a benefit in here for me, not only for this particular situation, but for the rest of my life.  When I solve it, I solve it for all time within myself."  With this in mind, you empower yourself.   You lift your energy up, you give yourself a chance to find the gold in the dark.  And when you finally do find it, like a bird set free from its cage, you will miraculously be free to be yourself again.
  

What to do to break free from Depression without having to resort to alcohol, drugs, or pharmaceuticals:

• Be the source of your own happiness
• Fill yourself up with love by doing things you love that are not dependent on anyone else
• Look at the 'worst case scenarios' and face your fears
• Learn to be content with being by yourself; you're going to be with you your whole life, might as well be your best and most loving friend
• Surround yourself with people who will inspire and motivate you; join groups that get you out of yourself and into life
• Stay active; exercise regularly
• Spend time in nature
• Meditate
• Treat yourself the way you deserve to be treated, it makes you feel good
• Laugh a lot; smile.  That alone can lift up your energy and pick your spirits up
• Have a life coach, therapist, or trusted friend whom you can talk to whenever you feel down.  These are people who have earned the right to hear your story.  They can be your greatest resource for empathy, connection, and can help put things in perspective and offer solutions
• Enroll in a Tai-chi, karate, or movement meditation class.  You want to move the negative energy lodged in the body caused by the depression or trauma and release it through active movement
• Start a yoga practice
• Get plenty of sleep to re-charge your body and mind
• Cultivate gratitude in your life.  Have a gratitude journal that you write in everyday 5 things for which you are grateful for, and 3 things for which you are grateful for not
• Find a way to be of service
• Always learn something new.  You want to be growing all the time
• Treat your body like a temple.  Feed it only good things
• Remember: your life is a gift!    

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Charlie Pacello is a PTSD and Healing Trauma Recovery Expert and Life Coach, a former US Air Force Lieutenant, and creator of the program, 'Lt. Pacello's Life Training Program.'  He can be reached by visiting his website at www.charliepacello.com