How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration

Negative only means not yet redeemed by conscious integration.

We needed all the experiences of our life—positive and negative—to become as emotionally and spiritually rich as we are! “My barn having burned down, I now can see the moon,” the Zen saying goes.

The more spiritually conscious we become, the more we allow ourselves to recognize the subtle face of pain and fear that lurks behind the behaviors we judge. “It is only with the heart that one sees rightly” (The Little Prince).

We distinguish anger (a true feeling) from drama (an avoidance of true feeling). It takes heroic work to drop drama and show responsible anger. The neurotic ego clings to negative excitement. The adult functional ego loves the positive excitement of expressing true feeling and then being released from it.

An Action occurs (open to any interpretation) My Belief interprets the action in a specific way A Consequence occurs: the feeling based on the belief that was triggered by the action So A: What happened B: What I believe C: What I feel It may seem that A led to C. But B, the disappeared middle, requires attention. A can only get to C through B! In

Until I see another’s behavior with compassion, I have not understood it.

Change the statement “This is how bad I am” to “This is how badly I need to know this, or to do this, or to include this.”

“I am powerless in the face of this fear” changes to “I found a choice where I thought there was only a dead end.”

You can be informed by others’ behavior rather than affected by it. You can observe the behavior of others without having to react to it or to be controlled by it. You operate from your own repertory of responses that uphold you no matter what others do, say, or mean to you.