Awareness That Heals Robert J Strock

We enter the first core principle of Friendly Mind—an awareness of life’s most challenging feelings and situations. Friendly Mind subtlety grounds and benefits us by looking at this awareness in a neutral or positive light. This episode explores this principle, which is the underbelly of all the other Friendly Mind principles. If we don’t stay grounded with clarity of the specific challenges we face in our daily lives, we limit our capacity for fulfillment, inspiration, and personal evolution.
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This important episode highlights and contrasts Friendly Mind with other methods, identifying similarities yet making the valuable differences clear. Friendly Mind clarifies how affirmations, positive thinking, "fixing" feelings, self-judgment, and the more conventional expression of “I’m fine” all fall short of true healing. They miss the critical element of responding as simultaneously as possible with awareness of life’s challenges and the value of guiding ourselves toward well-being and healing. These distinctions help us understand the subtlety of Friendly Mind.
Listen to the episode and find out more at: Awareness That Heals

We continue to explore impossible standards that impale our progress toward healing. Friendly Mind guides us to do and be all that is realistically possible while helping us to not be slaves to these pressures. With personal examples, we closely explore the myriad of ways we guilt and pressure ourselves to be different than who we are and can be in our own bodies. We push ourselves to get rid of our anxiety, depression, and fear or religion, spirituality, non-spiritual beliefs, or intelligence. However, Friendly Mind teaches us to come back again and again, doing and honoring our best efforts. It also encourages us to gain a bit of humor at our desire to be more than our best efforts.
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Childhood experiences and culture teach many of us to strive for impossible, unrealistic, or unreachable standards. This episode explores the trap created by these standards and introduces how to free ourselves. Friendly Mind creates a realistic, present focus on supportive and realistic thoughts. We look closely at standards and expectations relating to family, friendship, work, love, sex, youthfulness, and success. This is the first episode to deal with unreachable standards by identifying a grounded, balanced focus on what is possible.
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With practice, Friendly Mind helps us identify with who we are becoming rather than with our feelings in a given moment or situation. Friendly Mind steers our focus and understanding toward our own wisdom, with it becoming clearer and clearer that Friendly Mind’s guidance and response is more important than what we feel. This Friendly Mind could be called wisdom, God’s guidance, or intuition. However, listening to and finding the best guidance, no matter what we call it, to deal with our greatest challenges is the most important step. We will explore the second arrow in Buddhism, which teaches that the response to suffering is the key to giving ourselves control, not changing the original feeling of suffering itself. This golden truth promotes real healing that we all can learn. Exemplified with personal stories and experiences, we’ll see how to lessen or eliminate primary and secondary ways we unwittingly add pain.
Listen to the episode and find out more at: Awareness That Heals

In the Friendly Mind, we learn the value and benefit to ourselves and others of focusing on our responses to challenging emotions and situations rather than trying to change the feelings themselves. Accepting these emotions feels counterintuitive at first. However, with encouragement and practiced dedication, we learn the importance of thoughts, especially those that help us accept our situations and feelings. Acceptance begins a process of learning to independently act from emotions without denial. It also helps counteract the hypnotic effect of the normal instinct to instantly do whatever makes us feel better. However, a Friendly Mind teaches how to slow down and care for ourselves by learning to guide our thoughts, rather than trying to use grandiose measures to unsuccessfully change our feelings.
Listen to the episode and find out more at: Awareness That Heals