Attititude towards Life
Dr Suriyakhatun Osman copyright




In the name of God the Beneficient and the Merciful

The Cause of All Negative Emotions is a disruption in the Body's Energy System. So reads the caption in the beginning of the Emotional Freedom Technique manual I had downloaded for free from the internet. Another person said that the reason we are traumatised is because our emotions lose its fluidity and we freeze them inside of us and we get ill from the rigidity of the stuck feelings.


Recognize that life is what you get when you’re born ... living is what you do with it."
-- Jim Allen

Often times when I ask people to dive within and look into themselves , the pain they feel makes them not want to look anymore but every once in a while, someone who is willing to continue looking and facing the pain will come along and this person will then start transforming. I have often wondered how it is that when what is hidden within ourselves becomes known, it changes and transforms becomes fluid and moves on. Then there are the problems that seemed insurmountable. What to do about them, we worry about them day and night, walk around with stooped shoulders from the great weight of the problem . I ve had my fair share of having seemingly insurmountable problmes, also listening in to these insurmountable problems , and some of them do seem really unbearable. And again my answer to these people who came to me with these huge burdens was to look at them , shining the light of consiousness and of presence, inviting in the Divine presence that may perhaps provide a solution. And, sometimes the solution was really simply that the problem that seemed so huge, like a huge dragon casting its shadows on our lives, shrinks to the size of a wee lizard! What kind of attitude, stance, manner of existence is one that will give us the peace and joy we seek? The pleasure of living life which as time goes by becomes more and more elusive. The constant thoughts of I will be happy when this happens and then when this finally happens, the happiness moves just out of reach and we find ouselves pursuing another mirage with the thought of I will be happy when ..... When I started writing this, it was with the perspective of a person who has problems and will continue to have problems but who lives with enough  resources  and under what I would say are pretty optimal and condusive circumstances .I think will will continue to write with this perspective for most of us reading this, if we have the time and the means to be reading this, will be in this situation. Since writing this however , I have attended a 3 day workshop highlighting the situation of a people in an occupied war zone, where every day people wake up with no other thought but how to survive that day and live the next. I cannot even begin to imagine the reality of being in this situation either as the oppressor or the oppressed for it must be very difficult to be in either situation. I have therefore now an added perspective of seeing how old stuck feelings, that are not only the feelings of the person but also of the whole collective consciousness of a nation can impact on people's lives and behaviour and it is those who can take themselves out of the scripting that has been embeded into their consciousness , individual and collective who will then be able to regain their peace.
Before I proceed any further , I would like for us to do a simple exercise for ouselves and it is a process that is most healing if we do it right . Himayat taught me about Inquiry with presence , it is a practice that helps us find the motives behing the motives and the feelings behind the feelings, The inquiry into the very foundation of our actions and reactions. For me it is like shining the Divine light into the darkest areas of our being , the parts of us that remain hidden except for those willing to really examine and look.
The simple tool that I use here is a journalling technique of Dailogue
"Someone to tell it to is one of the fundamental needs of human beings." -- Miles Franklin
With this tool, you carry on a written conversation, making up the parts for both speakers.
Your dialogue partner(s) can be any person or thing that you want it to be .It can even be parts of yourself. You can have more than one dialogue partner for for a start let us limit it to one dialogue partner.
 We begin by being conscious of our breathing and focusing on the heart space, the chest area that has as its boundaries the clavicle, the rib cage and the diaphragm. As you do this, you become aware of the breathing becoming slower and steadier . When you feel youself getting into the meditative state, you can start the Inquiry with presence that I have modified so that we can do it for ourselves
First write down "ME" and write your question. Then write down the name of the partner you are talking with and note his/her/its response. Then ask another question. You make up the response. You do both parts of the dialogue. Your dialogue partner can also ask you questions. In doing this , use your imagination and make it up as you go along but let it be an expression of you. Write for 10 to 30 minutes. Write as quickly as you can , this is an essential technique of journalling the speed stops you from being too analytical at this point.  As you get into the dialogue, ask questions like: "What is the meaning of this situation?" "Is there anything else?" "Is this the truth?" "Is there more you can tell me so I have full understanding?" When you have completed, read over the dialogue and write a short summary.

Feedback and suggestion is much appreciated
Part 2

While waiting for responses , I have been thinking on this topic over the weekend and would like to relate here a couple of things that I have been reflecting on.

I had a patient , a woman of 62 whose problems seemed to be numerous.She was hypertensive on medication but her blood pressure when I checked was normal. She had some arthritis as well but her suffering was far beyond the health problems she seemed to be having. A long time ago when she first got married, she had felt humiliated by something her husband did. The feeling had persisted up until the time she saw me.All the time she was on her guard taking note of all the comments her husband made, and she continued to feel hurt everyday , at every instance when she read into her husband's words belittling comments towards her. Even when he suggested they stopped for a meal on a journey, she read it as an attempt to ridicule her appettite. Indeed, she could not see what she was doing and to her, it seemed that it was her husband who persistingly and intentionally was making her life miserable.


I have some questions here that perhaps we can answer together.
She suggested that her husband needed a marriage counsellor so that he could stop what he was doing and she could stop feeling so bad about it.
Would this help her?
What would you suggest she do for herself ?


"We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to
 understand." -- Robert Cecil Day-Lewis
Part 3
In the last class I conducted, I had prepared the class way ahead and sent it in 4 sections.
This time , I thought I would let the class evolve from the feedback I got as well as from my own continued meditations and experiences as the days unfolded.
Before I comment on the feedback that I had , I would like to continue on a few reflections that I have had over the past few days.
We are not our emotions.Emotions need not be what drives us and emotions that we experience are surface ripples that do not touch the core of our being unless
 we let them . Emotions however, need to be addressed and we need to pay them due attention for they tell us a lot about what is happening within us, things that matter , things we need to know about ourselves and our attitudes for the first step towards having a healing attitude towards life is to know what our present
attitude is.
What I have discovered from having an active inner life is that there is within a constant reminder that things happen for a reason and to constantly be in a state of inquiry, asking myself what does this mean  what does this thing that is happening now address , personally for me , for my progress in my evolution and for the people that I serve?
I do realise however , when we are at the bottom of the negative end of the emotional tonal scale , we can hardly pull ourselves out and probably very few would be able to help themselves except those who are designated to be wounded healers , these people will not only heal themselves but would have gained enough insights into their problems to help others.
For those of us who have chosen healing as our path, we find we need to see our clients through their emotions to understand their attitudes and to guide them , giving gentle nudges until they find for themselves a different way of Being, one that helps them get the fuidity and gets them out of the stuck stages. And in this, one of the most important things we need to do is listen and we will not be able to listen to others if we have not made it a practice to listen to our own selves.
Again on the subject of emotions, I would like to focus on pain. What do we do when we feel pain?
Take painkillers and ignore the pain?
Live with the pain and just carry on?
Focus on the pain and react to the pain by having a poor me attitude?
Find the source of the pain and get rid of it? ( Not so simple for the most part)
This came for me in the mail today and I was most surprised since it has a lot to do with what I was going to write.
Since it has been put very nicely here I am pasting the whole article  since it says adequately what I had wanted to say as well as describes pretty well the practice of being present to the pain.

 
A GROWTH TIP – RELEASING PAIN (from a Higher Awareness posting.john@higherawareness.com)
Are you comfortable in your pain? “Pardon me?” you might say. “Pain is NOT comfortable!” Well, it can be. Many of us have lived in pain and distress and even minor pains like disappointment, frustration and disgust for so long that it has become normal for us.
 We identify with a ‘poor me’ perspective of ourselves. It’s so familiar that we resist changing. We’re more comfortable living with the pain we know than risking a move into a pain-free unknown.
 How do we get around this, then, if we truly want to be free of our pain? Once again, awareness is the key.
 We need to bring awareness to our experience.
 Try this process: When you are in pain, focus your attention on your feelings. Feel the sensations in your body without getting your head involved.
 Don’t judge or analyze your feelings.
Allow them to be there without getting hooked into the ‘I am suffering’ or the ‘I should not be suffering’ perspective.
When we truly experience our pain without identifying with it, we become a detached watcher of our experience.
And when we do this, guess what! The pain starts to dissolve.
The more we can bring this detached watcher to our experiences, the more we free ourselves from old patterns of suffering and anxiety.
It takes repeated attention to this process to shift old habits, and it’s well worth the effort to create a new identify for ourselves.

“As long as a part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.” -- Eckhart Tolle


A Spiritual Temperament
Hazrat Inayat Khan
The third aspect of our physical existence is the perfecting of our body, in other words the fineness, the sensitiveness, of the body.
There is a spiritual temperament, and that temperament you can see from a person’s body.There are sensitive people, maybe a little bit nervous, and then there are dense people who have quite a different aspect A sensitive person who can appreciate music, who can respond to the beauty of line and color, who can enjoy a salt and sweet, a sour and bitter taste fully, who can feel cold and heat, who can perceive fragrance, distinguish all these, it is he who is born with a spiritual temperament.
The person who has no love for music, who cannot appreciate fragrance, who cannot understand the beauty of line and color that person is dense, and it will take time for him to develop. Therefore the experience of all the joy and pleasure that life offers is not in materiality, it is in spirituality.It is not the material person who experiences life fully; it is the spiritual person who does so.

Going back to the case I related earlier I have this feedback from Gayle:
We can't 'make' anybody else do anything.
We can't make other people change their patterns and thought forms
We can only change ourselves.
To understand her own reactions is her best choice (even if he does go to
counselling)
To put triggers in place for herself each time she knows that she will
react.
Learn to Love herself
Learn to honour her own thoughts

These are things we learn from a lot of self help books and motivational courses we attend. How then do we apply these principles in healing ourselves and others who are suffering from what others do to us?
Actually the problem is not what people do to us. The problem is expectation, our expectation. So one of the first things I would like to suggest is to have no expectation of what things should be but to instead look at the reality or, what is.We keep getting hurt repeatedly because we expect things to change, people to change but the reality is that they do not change.Because we want people to change the focus we have is on the aspects of them that is hurting us and we want changed.

Again going back to the case I related earlier, the next thing I suggested to her was to focus on the positive apects of her husband. In order to do this, I suggested that she do a simple exercise every night before sleeping. I suggested that she counted at least 5 positive aspects of her husband before she went to sleep.
Another suggestion I had was to ask her to do a simple prayer as  zikr. A zikr is a repetition of a wazifah, in most cases a wazifah is a name of Allah , usually said to be 99 but in fact exceeds 99. Each Divine name reflects a divine quality and repeating wazifahs have a subtle effect on our being. I have pasted below a paragraph about the practice of Zikr. In this woman's case the zikr I asked her to do was a small prayer that  echoes what we have been saying before about focusing on the present. The translating of the prayer is:
My Lord God, protect me from regret of the past and anxiety over the future.
It is a famous prayer of Prophet Muhamed peace be upon him and the Arabic version sounds like this
Allahumma Inni A'uzubika minal Hammi Wal Hazn.

And by calling on the Name of God, in the form of prayer, or in Zikr, or in any other form, what the mystic does is to awaken the spirit of the real ego in order that it may manifest. It is just like a spring which rises out of the rock and which, as soon as the water has gained power and strength, breaks even through stone  and becomes a stream. So it is with the divine spark in man. Through concentration, through meditation, it breaks out and manifests; and where it manifests it washes away the stains of the false ego and turns into a greater and greater stream, which in turn becomes the source of comfort, consolation, healing, and  happiness for all who come into contact with that spirit.

Hazrat Inayat Khan message volume X pt 2

Another aspect of attitude is the attititude of acceptance , what Muslims call redha. Here  is a feedback from a Muslim woman who does healing practices and said she had faced a similar situation:

“Though it was a very hard thing to do, but I found out that when I redha (acceptance) whatever Allah has given to me, I felt a load dissappear from my heart. Sufi healing practice also helped me forget my resentment towards my husband's ego.”


The practices that she does daily are the purification breaths as well and the healing zikrs.The healing zikrs are Shafee/Kafee, Muhyi/Muid and Quddus/Hay.She also does energy center cleansing practice of Subhanallah-Qudus-Hu which I feel cannot be related here but has to be demonstrated. However a simple version can be safely done .

Energy center cleansing
In relation to the energy system of the body, a simple model would be the one of 7 energy centers or Chakras .These are the Base Center, the Sexual Center, the Solar Plexus Center, the Heart Center, the Throat Center , the Third Eye center and the Crown center. You can find an image of the energy centers at this URL: http://www.healingtherapies.info/images/chakras.gif
The simple version of energy center cleansing is to focus on each energy center and to recite aloud the purification zikr Quddus.
Al Quddus is one of the 99 names of Allah and it literally translates as The Holy One.

You will find classes about the Purification breaths archived on the sufihealing class website.


      To summarize what I have written about healing attititudes thus far:

1.Be aware of our motives and what moves us
2.Focus on the positive and the present.
3. Be aware that it is expectation which hurts us.
4. Acceptance of what is has to come before healing can take place.
5.Use tools to help us change our way of being.   

Part 5
There are some attitudes which I find essential if one is to lead a life of happiness and joy.
Joy and peace are essential states of being. They are what we would feel under the most optimal cicumstances but few of us are fortunate enough to have been conceived and born under optimal conditions. It is for this reason we get wounded, and the time of wounding goes beyond birth , sometimes I feel even beyond the moment of conception for we even inherit our state. There have been many occasions when I have treated emotional and health problems in infants by treating the state the mother was in when she was pregnant. I use homeopathy but then again homeopathy is also a form of vibrational/energy healing and I have no doubt that spritual healing can do the same.
A case I remember very well is that of an infant whom I saw for the first time while he was crying very angrily. His weeping was loud and angry and soon I began to get angry as well. It was at this point that I looked at his parents and noticed their anger as well. I took the baby from his mum and gave the infant to his dad , and asked him to take the infant out of the room and told him to repeat Ya Salam and feel the peace in his heart. I sat with the mum and lead her in a heart space exercise, asking her to focus on her breathing and I did an inquiry. I found out the reaon for her anger. She was angry with some doctors who had told her that her child was brain damaged and would not even be able to be brest fed. Her anger made her try very hard to breast feed and she did breast feed the child but she never stopped being very angry. It was true , the infant had cerebral palsy but the insensitive way the news was told to her made her angry. We then noticed the quiet for the child had stopped screaming and was calm.The couple came to ask me to heal their child who never stopped crying in his waking hours, with the only respite being when he slept.I treated all three of them that day and the child stopped being angry from them on. I am still seeing the child for his cerebral palsy, he is making slow progress.
This case illustrates the woundedness that the child experiencd almost from his birth, at a time when he was too vulnerable to know how to deal with it. Yet it was through healing his parents that he became calm.
The other point from this case was that I too started becoming angry, the anger was contagious and it is true in many of our real life situations when we are influenced by feelings of the whole group that we are in.
What then is the atttitude that we need to remain an oasis of peace in the midst of the chaotic emotions and negativity that surrounds us ? A lot of the answers are within what I have already written and a few more will be offered soon.
I am sorry that the conclusion to the class I had conducted is so late.
I had intended to write it at the end of April but I ended up in Kota Kinabalu  instead and was there for more than 3 weeks!

I had asked in a previous post:
What then is the atttitude that we need to remain an oasis of peace in the midst of the chaotic
 emotions and negativity that surrounds us ?

A lot of the answers are within what I have already written and a few more will be offered soon.

I had felt severelly tested when I had to face the situation I was in. My husband was very ill, I had never been in such a situation except when my dad was terminally ill and I was only 16.
I still remember the heaviness that haunted me those days knowing fully well it was only a matter of time before my dad was to die. The sadness I experienced lasted months before he died and after he died.
This time faced with my husband's acute fulminating illness, I had to go within myself to find that  oasis of peace and acceptance come what may.
I actually did find it and was actually ready for the worst even while I remained hopeful and continued to pray for his recovery.
I surrendered what was beyond my control and continued to do all I could under the circumstances.
When he woke up from all the sedatives they had put him under, I told him that he had been chosen to experience something very unique and rare and that it would help him in the work he had still to do.
So what I found in all that I had undergone was that hope and surrender and looking for the silver lining behind every incident helped me tremoundously.
Admitting to being wrong and apologizing were two other attitudes that saved a very difficult situation I had gotten into because all my hidden animosities had reared its ugly head under the stress I was in. There  was resolution in what could have become a severe rift between myself and my eldest daughter.
Many times I had to go within myself and make myself present to my emotions because I found myself  getting numb and did not want to be numb for I wanted to be in touch with my emotions and experience them fully .
I am finding myself more compassionate with my patients in the few days that I have resumed work .
I am also finding ways to couch whatever I need to tell them in the most positive terms for I discovered that it is never too foolish to have hope even in the most seemingly hopeless situation and that to take away hope from someone is a cruel thing to do and is needless for even if one has to face the death of a beloved , it helps to hope even to the last moment for a reprieve while at the same time preparing our beloved one to face the inevitable and surrendering oneself to face whatever happens.
One of my worse moments came when a chest specialist came to talk to me about my husband's lungs.
He said " Your husband's lungs are like planks , they ve gone stiff ,"and he shook his head as if to tell me that my husband was beyond saving. He was wrong, but even if he was right , it was the worse thing any of the doctors told me.
I guess my manner sometimes is like this doctor, I wanted people to face reality and told them what I thought was the truth , but the truth is, one does not know the truth when it comes to prognosis.
An anesthetist, a wonderful Budhist Lady told me, " Your husband's Satt Score is very high,
 it is in the 80% fatality but then again, your husband is not a statistic, he is an individual.
I hung on to this and did not give up hope.
So this is the one last attitude that one has to have in this life is Hope.
Indeed there surely is more but I leave that for others to complete.