However, if you are using meditation to bliss out and avoid your pain, you are using your spirituality addictively. You are using your spirituality to bypass learning about and taking responsibility for your feelings.

This is what Lian was doing. Because he was avoiding learning from his feelings, he was continuing to think and behave in ways toward himself and others that caused him to feel depressed. Then, instead of exploring what he was doing that was causing his feeling self, his inner child, to feel depressed, he was meditating to try to get rid of feelings.

In his work with me, Lian discovered that he was constantly either ignoring his inner child – his feeling self – or he was in self-judgment. The combination of ignoring himself – which he did primarily through meditation – and judging himself resulted in his inner child feeling unloved, unimportant, and unseen. Lian saw that if he treated his actual children in way he treated himself – ignoring their feelings and constantly judging them – they would also feel badly and maybe depressed. But Lian did attend to his actual children’s feelings and needs. It was his own that he was ignoring and judging.

Lian realized that he was treating himself way his parents had treated him. He was a much better parent to his children than his parents had been with him, but he was parenting his own inner child in way he had been parented. He was not only treating himself way he had been treated, he was treating himself way his parents had treated themselves. As a result, he was not being a good role model for his children of personal responsibility for his own feelings, just as his parents had been a poor role model for him.

In course of working with me, Lian learned Inner Bonding process that we teach. He learned to welcome his painful feelings during meditation. He learned to quiet self-judgmental part of himself and to treat himself with caring and respect. He learned to take loving action in his own behalf so that his inner child no longer felt abandoned by him. It was inner abandonment that was causing his depression. He discovered that his depression was actually a gift – a way his inner child was letting him know that he was not being loving to himself. With practice, Lian learned to take loving care of himself and his depression disappeared. Now his meditation practice was no longer a spiritual bypass.

The only way we can effectively change temperature is to change thermostat. That’s a simple matter in living room, but more involved in mind.

Most often, our initial impressions of money, work, and relationships form basis of our mental and emotional framework about these subjects. Our parents or primary caregivers are main shapers of these frameworks, but extended family, peers, clergy, and entire culture contribute as well.

We can’t change these first impressions, but we can realize they many of them were based on faulty information.

When we modify our first impressions with new information, we adjust our internal thermostats.

Find that new information (work can be fun, money can be plentiful) and you will enjoy a new experience.

If not, consequences of first impressions will linger for a lifetime.

Copyright 2004 by Tony Papajohn Tony writes and speaks on success. Subscribe to his free SuccessMotivator e-zine at http://www.successmotivator.com