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    Dancing with Tigers: Unblock your Life
    Dancing with Tigers: Unblock your Life
    Dancing with Tigers: Unblock your Life
    Ebook145 pages2 hours

    Dancing with Tigers: Unblock your Life

    By Janet Lapp

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    About this ebook

    Janet’s best-selling book to inspire you to overcome personal blocks toward a life of fulfillment and abundance, is a warm book of encouragement, optimism, and overcoming.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateMar 2, 2015
    ISBN9781885365095
    Dancing with Tigers: Unblock your Life

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      Book preview

      Dancing with Tigers - Janet Lapp

      unites.

      CHAPTER ONE

      YOU CAN GET THERE FROM HERE

      In ancient times, a king had a boulder placed on a roadway. Then he hid himself and watched to see if anyone would remove the huge rock. Some of the king's wealthiest merchants and courtiers came by and simply walked around it. Many loudly blamed the king for not keeping the roads clear, but none did anything about getting the big stone out of the way. Then a peasant came along carrying a load of vegetables. On approaching the boulder, the peasant laid down his burden and tried to move the stone to the side of the road. After much pushing and straining, he finally succeeded. As the peasant picked up his load of vegetables, he noticed a purse lying in the road where the boulder had been. The purse contained many gold coins and a note from the king indicating that the gold was for the person who removed the boulder from the roadway. The peasant learned what many of us never understand. Not only that every obstacle presents an opportunity to improve one's condition, but that the rewards go to those who are responsible and accountable, and who are willing to do the difficult work that others won’t do.

      The phrase ‘Dancing with Tigers’ is counter-intuitive; the intuitive response to a tiger is to flee, not to dance. But have you ever watched a lion- or tiger-tamer perform? The tamer has leaned to be accountable and master his or her own fear, such that the animal no longer responds to the tamer’s fear. The tamer has learned appropriately skilled behaviors to be able to work with wild animals. When these behaviors are artfully practiced, and fear is managed, life appears easy. It appears as though the tamer is even dancing with the tiger.

      And so too, life. Throughout the journey of life, we learn to master our fears and develop skilled behavior. The peasant in our story was first accountable, and then took action. How difficult can that be for us? Well, difficult. If it were easy, we would all be emotionally healthy and fully alive but sadly, very few choose the difficult path to health. But simple it can be when we decide to identify and then walk through our fears, and to change our unskilled behaviors.

      Why is change difficult? Disruptive change, in which we are forced to alter habitual thinking or behavior, requires counter-intuitive thinking, or the ability to work against how one would normally or intuitively think or react. When we are required to change, a healthy response is not to resist change (intuitive) but to set up a plan to alter our own thinking and behavior (counter-intuitive). Such is the goal of this book; to guide you through your own resistance to counter-intuitive thinking, so that you might master your fears and acquire new behaviors.

      What was that tiger story really about? The tiger represents the instinctual part of us that, when injured, either aggresses or withdraws. When we ourselves have been injured, as was the abandoned tiger cub, we can adopt an overly aggressive or overly passive stance in life to protect ourselves and by so doing, attempt to attract the attention we never received as cubs. From time to time throughout life, people or events refuse to play into our scene and force us to face ourselves (our shadows), as did the second tiger or ‘creature’ in the story. The process of facing self can be bloodying. The hyena represents the wise helper on our path, who can guide us if only we allow him or her. When we align our instincts with our learned responses, learn to know and accept our shadow, and listen to our wise teachers, we can dance with any creature who would confront us.

      In the next few chapters, you can choose to temporarily suspend belief in old rules that no longer work for you, and choose to learn new guides to self-honor, self-protect, and grow to the next level. You can develop a counter-intuitive response to bad events and to disturbing ‘creatures’ on your path. Although the habitual reaction to that obnoxious co-worker, abusive mate, or nagging parent is intuitively negative, when you understand that you are given the gifts of ‘feared creatures’ or ‘nasty people’ on your path, you can choose to confront and embrace the lessons taught by those creatures. Those people you label now as problems probably represent the ‘shadow’ or hidden parts of yourself; those parts you do not recognize and cannot accept. You push these parts out of consciousness and project them onto other people (see Chapter 4).

      When you accept that those objectionable traits in others are actually parts of yourself that you don’t like, and you learn to acknowledge, accept, and change these parts if you don’t like them, then you choose to move to higher levels. Not only do you become whole, you incorporate the energy of the feared objects.

      If you refuse to do this work and run from your own fear, as did the jungle creatures from the tiger, fear will roam unchecked in your life and will control you. Once you stand firm in the face of fear, you will harness the energy once contained in it. The secret is not in dominating or conquering fear; it is in using fear as an ally, a friend, a messenger on your path, who has energy to give you, is part of your journey, and who would help you if you would but stand still long enough to let it. Instead of fighting off fear, you will relax into it long enough to get to know it, to accept it, and to learn the lessons it has to teach you.

      "It is not that you must be free from fear.

      The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create a resistance against fear. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn from it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it, not how to resist it through courage and so on."Krishnamurti

      Where has your journey taken you so far?

      What choices have you made to question old rules and to substitute newer, more adaptive yet counter-intuitive rules?

      Have you made choices to react to negative events and annoying people with an inquisitive response (what do I need to learn here?) rather than a repulsive one (I hate him!)?

      What choices have you made to walk through your fears, to deliberately perform new and temporarily unskilled behaviors that will lead to new levels of fear-less living?

      Until you begin to take full responsibility for your own experience of life, you have no hope of changing it. Whatever you take responsibility for, you can change. Blaming someone else for any aspect of your life puts the responsibility outside your control and thus makes you powerless to change it. You are trapped and imprisoned in blame until you take responsibility for it. Then, you can solve the pattern and become free.

      The life that you lead is a direct response to the choices that you make on a day-to-day basis.

      CHAPTER TWO

      THE MISSING PIECE

      Have you ever felt that others were ‘normal’ but that you had a missing piece? Or that life seemed so easy for the lucky few, but somehow you were stuck with the short-end-of-the-stick? Do you despair of ever being truly successful, or really happy?

      What messages about yourself did you hear as a child?

      If you recall a ‘perfectly happy childhood’ and yet have several troublesome blocks to your happiness or growth, I would ask you to continue believing that you had a happy childhood if you wish, yet accept that there were many lessons that you once learned that might no longer apply to you. These old lessons are blocking you from growth. In order to remove these, you will need to re-learn some old beliefs.

      Some of you will remember the turbulent changes in psychiatry during the 1950’s and early 1960’s, a period of time that I term the Culinary Era of Psychiatry, where treatments could poach, fry or pickle your brain. Although psycho-tropic drugs had been introduced, the old physical standbys had not yet been abandoned. Thus, it wasn’t unusual to receive a ‘physical’ therapy such as electro-convulsive or insulin-shock therapy, wet packs, baths and/or restraints in combination with psychotropic drugs. In those days, drugs were more primitive than they are now, were more difficult to titrate, and produced more side effects. This combination produced some pretty strange-looking psychiatric patients in the 50’s and 60’s; a chronically startled look from those who had received physical therapies, a glazed look from those on antipsychotics, and various strange physical mannerisms (drooling, shuffling, sore bottom) from those with medication side effects.

      They did their best in those days, not knowing any differently. In retrospect, I remember any ‘therapy’ I received over the course of several hospitalizations as not really therapy, but punishment. Physical treatments or medications were to not change our thinking but rather dull it. In those days, the theoretical orientation in vogue was psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy. Thus, our 30 minutes per week was spent in silence. How in the world a chronically depressed schizoaffective personality such as me was supposed to be verbal enough to begin to express what I had no clue about anyway, was beyond me.

      Once a month we patients would line up for a tribunal, or an appearance before the ‘release’ board, where privileges would be reviewed, denied or granted. Most of us would be on our best behavior just before the tribunals, because status on the ward had everything to do with what privileges we could get. There was some status in isolation or SP (suicidal precautions) or for the most bizarre symptomatology and/or strangest history (word gets around), the real leaders were those with grounds privileges and access to the outside world, and so we all worked for those.

      My own physical treatments were occasionally based on my behavior, I suppose, so I sensed after a while I could control these treatments, even though I was not always clear about what I did to deserve them. In a world of very little control, where most of our dignity had been stripped on admission along with our clothes, many of us learned to work for any form of attention, as punishing as it might be. Perhaps my drive to work with mental health resulted from my early treatment; who knows where our journeys begin.

      But I digress. One day toward the end of what was to be my last and final

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