Turn Off the Old Head Tapes

Transcript

Fear. Fear is primary in depression. We have a sense of living in the depths of this fear, and it paralyzes us. So I want you to try to hear what I am going to say about this fear, that fear is a head thing—and this head tape has been dictating, running if you will, your life from the time you were born until now. To get well, we’ve got to turn that old head tape off. These head tapes come from our parents’ voices, the voice of the tribe that’s influencing us, the voice of our culture that says buy this—overwhelmed with advertising—go do this, be that, become this. We don’t feel like we measure up. I’m coming from a wounded place with my mother. We were totally different and she was always pressing me in this mold and I’m always feeling guilty because I can’t fulfill that roll. But I hear her voice going on in my head all the time, and it’s causing me a lot of guilt and a lot of fear because I’m not pleasing my mother. The same thing happens because I’m not well, I go into my marriage with the same strong voice—pick up another strong voice, the voice of my husband. So this tape keeps running. Turn the head tape off. Fear is a head thing. If you don’t turn it off it gets down into our emotions and paralyzes us. The false self is a fabricated self. It’s one that we have developed ourselves to protect us from pain, from fear, from places that we’ve been hurt in. We don’t want to go there anymore, so we develop—depending on what personality type we are—various defense mechanisms. These defense mechanisms that we create are what causes us to move into what I call excessive compulsive behavior patterns. Number one is, for an introvert, would be just to retreat. They don’t like confrontation so they keep their mouth shut, take the abuse and leave. There would be no possibility for a cross conversation. That’s not a safe place for them, so that’s how they defend. They go in a hiding place. Unfortunately, when they go in there, the pain’s still there. It doesn’t help a bit because nothing was changed within them. For a more active person, they tend to run. I’m going to create this false world of utopia, and I live my illusion out in that world where there’s no pain. Who wants to embrace their pain? That’s what we are really called to do in the darkness, because we learn from our pain. So we have all sorts of ways of defending ourselves against pain, but unfortunately, until we learn to embrace the pain and the joy, embrace all of life; if we shut out the pain, we shut out the joy. The wind blows terribly outside, but the moonbeams leak through the cracks and the roof planks of my ruined house. That’s it. That the two-fold way we are to live. The wind’s blowing, the turbulence is there, but I know that the Spirit of Love is leaking through the roof planks of my ruined house. When we come to that we are waking up.