The philosophical and psychological perspective of the Essence experience by Dr Menis Yousry
It is nowadays widely accepted that most human conditioning occurs during the first seven years of life and makes people who they are in later years. This conditioning can either make or break our goals and dreams in our adult life. The first relationship each individual has is with his or her parents, especially with the mother and this forms the model for that individual’s relationships throughout life. In a way, the mother represents the gateway for life; from the very first moment she sees her child, she’s setting the tone of life for that child.
The organization of the social brain is initially shaped by the nature of the parent-child interactions, forming the basic infrastructure of the moment-to-moment experience of the world and of other people. Very often, this experience is reinforced and influenced by early family relationships such as the relationship between the parents and with other members of the family, even with previous generations. We copy and learn everything from our parents; every move they make, we pick up on. We learn from them by witnessing how they handle challenges. Consequently, any disturbance in the life of our family of origin can have a huge impact on the individual’s life and relationships, which can last for a lifetime.
It is generally accepted that our minds have a conscious and a subconscious part; these two elements can be likened to a short-term memory and long-term memory; the neurobiologist Professor Lipton stated that the subconscious mind is like a recording device in that it has recorded ‘programmers.’ At the push of a button it plays those programmers back to us and it will always play them back in exactly the same way. It is reasonable to assume that this button is often triggered by stimuli in the environment; these programmers are formed in the child’s mind at an early age and during the last stages of foetal development; for example, the responses of the mother to her environment are translated by the foetus into the programmers that are stored in the subconscious mind.
Before a child is born up until 5 years of age, the way s/he hears, sees and experiences the world are programmers that are directly downloading into the subconscious mind without any analysis or dispute; the child is not really operating from the realm of the conscious mind. This huge influx of such information comes from parents, siblings and the community and is downloaded as facts, as ‘truth’ into programs in the subconscious mind.
According to Bruce Lipton, the conscious mind occupies 5% of the mind; it holds our desires, our aspirations for life. On the other hand, our subconscious mind, containing programs we learned from our parents and other people’s beliefs, occupies 95% of the mind. The subconscious mind therefore informs us the majority of the time. This is a very important point, since we often want to do something but end up not achieving it because the limiting beliefs in our subconscious mind are in direct contradiction to what we want in our conscious mind. They override our intentions because they are stronger, more powerful intentions.
This is why we often behave like our parents, because of the programming we received from them in the subconscious mind and it can be very difficult to separate from them. It takes comparatively few hours for us to separate from our mother during birth physically but a lifetime to separate emotionally. We are often unaware of this since we learned our ways of living and behaviour from them during the first five years of life during the ‘childhood download’ period. In many ways we are our parents because we carry them everywhere we go. Also, some parents find that their children display certain behaviors they did not like about their own parents. We are therefore also our children; because our children become like us, observing them will teach us what we carry from our parents.
It is often difficult for us to make positive changes in our lives because some of the programming we received early in life is limiting and often sabotages what we want. Often we cannot understand why we are getting negative results we do not want and we sometimes lay the blame on other people for our lack of achievements. We sabotage ourselves because of our unconscious opposing beliefs about what we consciously want. If we accept the assumption that we have been programmed with limiting beliefs, then we first need to bring them to our conscious mind and then work on adding new positive experiences that can override the beliefs that undermine us.
The Essence course gives participants the opportunity to engage in life-like experiences which elicit life-like reactions from the subconscious mind. Essence facilitates, explores and untangles our unconscious store of information and the unresolved issues that are rooted in our family of origin, even back to previous generations, in a very loving and compassionate way. This process develops new experiences to replace some of the negative old ones in order to allow each individual to move into a different consciousness. The experiential nature of this work invites participants to reflect at every moment on our reactions to circumstances that come our way. We discover how we habitually react to situations without the control of conscious mind and begin to see the possibilities of dealing with situations without the fearful memories from the past.
The Essence course encourages participants to recognize and explore whatever arises from this process and not run away from it as we often do; running away from whatever arises, such as fear or pain, can reinforce something that only actually exists in the past. People often spend their lives chasing positive emotions and running away from negative ones, but what we are experiencing is the story we have constructed around a difficult situation and the fear this invokes in us. Yet our fear is only linked to a story and everything we experience only has the memory we give it.
The influences of our relationship with our family of origin, culture and previous generations are often invisible and bind us to the past, our parents and those past generations. Often those influences create hidden dynamics made up of unresolved issues; unfinished business, unfair decisions and many other unusual circumstances are often stored in our system. They are repeatedly reinforced when we unconsciously draw matching life situations to us. It is possible that such patterns keep manifesting themselves in our lives simply because they have not been resolved and the pattern keeps reoccurring as the individual attempts to find a solution.
Such hidden dynamics become apparent in the group work in the seminar; they can become clear by observing the family from which they have originated, even back to previous generations. The individual has created an internal model of reality about how things are and s/he often gravitates toward either creating the same situation or failing attempts to create the opposite. To shed light on such patterns can mean observing the configuration of the family of origin, even going as far as facing past situations again but in the present; reconciling oneself with the past can produce an outstanding resolution and eliminate future suffering.
The common thread through all Essence seminars is awareness, compassion and facing what is with acceptance. In order for us to grow, sometimes we may need to face our own conflict so we can rise above it and manage it. Essence is about facing reality one more time, accepting family situations and even agreeing to them because it is agreeing to what is. At this stage, suffering can be replaced with an acceptance of what happened without fighting our past and then we can make a space for something new. Through this method of looking deeply at the impact of parental influences, the Essence experience facilitates people’s awareness of who and where they are now, taking them on a journey to embrace the past without resistance so they can see the past as past. That is because compassion and acceptance of history releases people from constantly failing, it stops them from trying to create the unachievable ideal world to compensate for unresolved, unacceptable past hurts.
When we cannot stand some aspects of ourselves, such aspects often manifest as an attack on other people. This dislike of ourselves can also manifest in attempts to nurture other people i.e. to give them the things that we do not have (rejecting ourselves for not having them at the same time). Obviously we often lose because we cannot give anything we do not have. Therefore, embracing the painful deep parts of us with mercy, compassion and forgiveness can create peace with ourselves - and consequently, peace with everyone.
The desire to be perfect in life creates anxiety and may attract obstacles our way. We have grown up conditioned into comparing ourselves with others, constantly judging if we’re better or worse than them. We have learned to find fault with ourselves; the person who judges you the most is you, and in that moment of judgment we are separating ourselves from who we really are. When we judge ourselves or anyone else, we are not present in the moment. However, if we can accept who we are, and believe that nothing needs to be ‘fixed’ or to be perfect, better or stronger, then we experience a whole new way of living. If we follow our destiny and accept everything that happens to us with compassion, it leads to transformation; we are free.
So, accepting the past means letting go of the past; if we cannot let go of something then we cannot accept something new. We cannot arrive anywhere if we do not leave where we were. If we do not accept the past, we are controlled by what we cannot accept and it becomes stronger; every attempt to try to be free of it will actually focus on it more.
The desire to be perfect is a never-ending desire to change that cannot achieve transformation; however, the investigation of all our negative feelings rather than the rejection of them allows us to be at peace with those negative feelings. Fighting negative feelings is like fighting a war with a war already inside us; nothing can give us more confidence than learning to observe and accept our doubt, nothing can help us feel compassion more than watching our own anger, nothing can give us more love than seeing our lack of love. There is no need to fight in order to change because if you fight for peace in your life, it is just another war. As Gandhi said: we must never fight injustice; instead we must strive to make it visible. Such a philosophy is explored in Essence courses in depth.
The supportive environment of Essence courses allows participants to discover ways to become more in tune with life. They learn to draw on their own resources once they find peace with what life brought them in the past and what it now brings to them, including parental circumstances. There is a great power in this process that facilitates individuals to be true to the aspirations that feel instinctively right for them. The course transforms hidden negative dynamics to uncover positive, hidden solutions.
