Each month during the P4 program there is a theme that focuses on a different aspect of our mission to recognize and release resistance Here is a sample program.
Key question: How does the need for approval, and the avoidance of disapproval, keep you from living your deepest truth?
Topics for journaling: Whose approval is most important to you? What, if anything, have you sacrificed to get it? What does this particular need for approval tell you about yourself?
Meditation: On feeling complete as you are right now.
When a wildflower blows in the breeze, it just is. The wildflower doesn’t lament about not being a shrub, or about the size of its petals compared to the flowers across the way. Nor does it worry about letting down the earth. The wildflower just exists, and grows, and wilts, and then dissolves into compost so that the next expression of life can come forth at that very spot.
Sit in meditation during this month as would the wildflower. Know that everything arising in your consciousness is an aspect of your life-force, indivisible from all creation, and just as it should be. Meet each concern or doubt or confusion or distraction or powerful emotion or thought, once you’re able to witness it, with appreciation and equanimity. Imagine that your witness function is the entire meadow,beholding with tenderness everything that arises within it.
There’s no one to approve, and nothing requiring approval.
Exploration:
Part 1: Do something important to you that you’re pretty certain would arouse significant disapproval from a loved one. Stay present to all the feelings and sensations that arise in your body. Pay attention like an avid scientist. Cradle each and every sensation with compassion. Send in an email describing the experience.
Part 2: Have a conversation about this experience with the person whose disapproval you expected. During the conversation, notice the flow of contraction and expansion in your body. If you become reactive, pause and share what’s happening. Resume only if and when you’re truly present. Make the goal of the conversation to share, and listen, with a wide-open heart.
Partner Work: Call your partner both before and after the above exploration. Before, speak the whole truth about everything that stirs within you about the upcoming experience. Help one another become present to any elusive emotion or stories involved. Support one another in moving through the fears that may arise in risking disapproval.
Talk about any suspected triggers that might get pulled by the other person’s response to your action, by the way they may behave in acting out their disapproval. Do the specialized version of surfing if necessary to encourage the greatest openness when the time actually comes.
(What’s the worst thing that could happen? And if it did, how would that make you feel? Now go ahead and imagine it happening and feel everything that comes up till you expand.)
After, share with complete honesty about what transpired. Talk over when you stayed open and when, perhaps, you found yourself shutting down. Reflect for one another what those shutdowns may reveal about wounded places calling for more attention.