12 steps
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The following are 12 steps that I sent to a friend of mine to help him with his marriage. The concepts behind the points come from many of the books that I have read since I have been here. I pray that these points will help you too!
1. YOU are not your thoughts.
2. Your thoughts are what makes up your ego and we are commanded to take them captive.
3. Defending yourself is the mind’s way of protecting your ego.
4. To prevent your mind from taking you over to protect the ego, you must surrender to the moment.
5. You do this by never disagreeing with what is said to you. Just observe and absorb it. Don’t resist it.
6. Resistance to what the mind perceives as negative information causes pain through the ego.
7. When you find yourself in a place where you are debating who is right and wrong, that is the ego. Kill it by surrendering to the inferior position (which is the superior spiritual position) and stop resisting the other person. Absorb their words. You are not fighting them. You are most likely fighting their ego which cannot be defeated by another ego.
8. Pretend that you were just put into your body and you are just observing what is around you and what they are saying. You cannot take anything personal this way which shuts down the ego.
9. Pain/suffering comes from judging the past or the future. Stop judging time and live in the NOW.
10. Anger is simply the result of judging a situation and not knowing how to deal with it. Anger is the ego’s way of trying to trump the other person’s ego. That is why it never works. Instead, when you feel the emotion rising, recognize that it is not you and that it is your ego and take it captive. Then simply observe the simple facts of the situation and decide what is the best course of action to remedy it. Sometimes the best way to do this is to remove yourself from the source of the frustration to better move through these steps properly.
11. All relationship decisions in the now are to be made for the benefit of others–putting others first.
12. It’s not about you. Let others be right and make it about them. Even if they are “wrong,” it’s their ego that is just out of alignment. It’s not who they are. They are not their thoughts (rule #1).
Read these every day, or have your phone read them to you right before you eat a meal. That way you will condition and train yourself to learn and apply these principles.