You Can’t Reclaim Your Power From Spirit and Relinquish Your Power to an Expert at the Same Time

I am consistently updating and adding resources to The Program. Here’s the latest installment for Lesson 41: Your Capacity, which appears as part of the Metal Phase during Principle #2: Addiction is a Cycle.

This one is all about feeling. And just like the feelings that drove us during active addiction, the ones that arise from digging into the roots of investigative recovery can be overwhelming.

Because when a feeling overtakes us and we follow like a lemming, it can lead us right off the cliff.

The flip side also has drawbacks because when we control the feeling following a path of logical structure and/or medicative numbness, we can end up in a suspended state of safety that turns into a life of flatness.

How do we reconcile this?

Before we look for an answer, let’s make things even more complicated…

“Randy, why am I on more drugs coming out of treatment than when I went in?”

When I led groups in treatment centers, I asked people to raise their hands and keep them up if they answered, “Yes,” to any of the following:

Since entering treatment, have you been diagnosed with and prescribed medication for:

* Depression?

* Anxiety?

* ADHD?

* Other?

Every single person had at least one hand raised, and the majority had both up—along with raising a foot or two.

That’s a lot of feelings, a lot of diagnosing, and a whole lot of treatment. So, it’s common for someone to ask, “How am I going to learn to deal with my feelings if I’m loaded up with prescription drugs?"

That’s a darn good question. One that requires answers from professional and ethical standpoints, and which are delivered by those legally and ethically allowed to do so. 

So, for our purposes here, I’m investigating this question from a spiritual standpoint and providing this perspective to the only other person who’s legally, ethically, and morally allowed to change their prescription: the client.

To simplify things and give us a place to begin our conversation, here’s what I call The Graph of Expression:

Key:

#1 - Black Zone: The socially acceptable and proper range of expression

#2 - Blue Zone: Depression

#3 - Red Zone: Anxiety

#4 - Brown Zone: Apathy

Here’s some detail:

The Black Zone is what greases the wheels of polite society and says:

* Thank you.

* Excuse me.

* Yes, please.

* No, thank you.

* My fault.

* No worries.

The Red Zone is where the fast feelings live, which can be described as:

* Up

* Riding the lightning

* Downloading inspiration

* In the flow

* “I wanna go fast!” ~Ricky Bobby

* Yes! Woohoo!

Heading down into the Blue Zone, we find the slow feelings, which can be described as:

* Bummed

* “I ain’t got no motivation.”

* Depressed 

* I’m moving slow today.

* Why should I go? What’s the point?

* No. I just don’t feel like it.

Staying in the Brown Zone, which is a compressed version of the Black Zone’s social norms, can look like:

* “Oh well, I never really liked that cat anyway.”

* “Which restaurant? I don’t care.”

* “Oh yeah. I guess I just forgot.”

* “Whatever.”

* “I don’t know…”

* “I don’t feel strongly either way…”

The Graph of Expression is a simple, visual map of the range of human feelings and provides a place to begin our exploration about where we’re at and where we’d like to go.

Once we’ve identified which zone is ours, what happens if we don’t like where we’re at and want to go about changing things?

Generally speaking, there are two ways to answer this question:

* From the the inside: “I will find and develop t