Chapter 3 - Dr. Roland Trujillo on Recovery from Anxiety, Rebellion, and Self harm With the Help of a Special Mindfulness Meditation

Time is both creative and destructive. What grows in time also deteriorates in time. Light is also creative and destructive. The light of the sun both warms and burns.

We are literally bathed in time, as waves of time cross over us. The Creator continues to create, and He sends forth the winds of time continuously to provide for His creation.

The passage of time should not trouble us in the slightest. Time is a gift, and if we are living as we ought, the Good Lord will give us all the time we need to fulfill our purpose and become as we ought, according to His will and with His grace.

The relationship between time and movement is that all movement occurs in time. The more time we have, the less we have to rush. But rushing actually diminishes the time we have. Were you to rush at the speed of light, you would have no more time, and you could do nothing. In order to accomplish anything outside of time, you must be in that dimension. Perhaps we can travel beyond the speed of light. This is because time is faster than light. Because God set light as a limit for the creation, I think we would need a dispensation from Him to travel faster.

The soul is actually a soul in a body. Being spirit, the soul does live in the timeless realm, unless it descends into the material and forgets its spiritual origins. That is why when we get caught up in worldly things, making goals, and seeking to make things happen, we become subject to the material realm and lose our spiritual underpinnings.

To operate outside of time means to have conquered time. And to conquer time, we must find union with the Creator Who lives in the timeless realm.

Our relationship to time depends on our level of consciousness. The meditative person, who has learned to stand back and be objective, is not subject to time as others are. He or she is aware of time, to be sure, but time does not drag for her, nor does she feel like she is running out of time. Her soul stands just outside of time, surveying all around her.

It is obvious that when you are full of love and patience, you feel like you have plenty of time. It is when you are resentful and ambitious that you feel like you don't have enough time. In fact you don't, because when you are resentful or ambitious (or goal oriented) you are separated from love and patience. And where do love and patience come from? They come from the timeless realm. The Creator loves us and is patient with us. Then we are able to turn around and be patient with others.

If you want to be patient with others, then stop setting goals for yourself.

Stop being resentful when things don't turn out as you wanted them to. Possibly the Good Lord has something different in mind for you.

We think of light as an energy, which it is. It is a facet of the electromagnetic spectrum. But light operates in time. Without time, no material creation could exist. Time is the matrix or ground of the material creation. As such, it is security or love.

God lives in the timeless realm. He gives time to the material creation. Time is the

matrix in which material being exists and in which movement and change occur.

Time is a gift for us to accomplish in this realm what we were created to accomplish. Time for us runs out when we die. On the other side of death is timelessness. We

measure time by observing change or by setting a goal.

We become aware of time whenever we set a goal. For example, as soon as you set a goal to get through the checkout line quickly, you become keenly aware of the passage of time. In impatience, you actually wish to get the wait over with.

Can you now see why impatience is hatred? In impatience we seek to deny others time. For example, our kids need time to grow and learn through discovery. They need time—lots of time. But in our impatience, we seek to make them learn, to make them mature, or to burden them with worries and concerns. When we are impatient, we are seeking some goal.

Often that goal is our own ego comfort. The impatient person lacks patience. And without patience, he or she cannot bear the sweet, gentle movement of time. He wants to get something behind him—in essence denying the time it would have taken to occur naturally.

The impatient person is aroused, nervous, and anticipatory. S/he feels no peace or relief until the goal is accomplished. If you have a goal, and something interferes (such as your child asking a question) then impatience is amplified. The goal is to accomplish the thing as soon as possible. In essence, again, the impatient person is seeking to eradicate time, destroy it, or bypass it in order to move right now instead of one minute later.

The child of the impatient goal-oriented parent feels the hurry and impatience as hatred. Can you now see why? Time is life. Whenever you make something too important, you are unconsciously seeking to eradicate or wipe out the time in which the slow, natural, joyous discovery and growth could have taken place.

And when you seek to force your child to learn too much too soon, you are denying them the life of time and the time of life.

Remember, time is the matrix—a womb, if you like—the love in which good comes to pass in this earthly realm. The ultimate act of hatred is murder, where a person cuts another's time prematurely short. But overt physical murder is not the only type of murder.

There is psychological murder. There is spiritual murder of the soul.

If you pressure someone to be something other than they are, your goal threatens to rob them of the time to develop. Whenever you impatiently seek to teach your child anything by yelling, bribing, rewarding, threatening or punishing them—you are making the accomplishment of that goal too important.

Pressure or bribe your child to brush his teeth, for example, and you are robbing him of the time in which he could have learned to do it himself

Little do you realize that in the process YOU ARE ALSO ROBBING YOURSELF. You are robbing yourself of the time in which you might have patiently reminded him over and over (until he saw for himself the wisdom of brushing his teeth). During that time period, you would have learned patience. And discovering and living and having your being in patience, your soul would have partaken of the timeless realm from which the Creator gives time.

Christ once spoke harshly to some the hypocrites around Him. He told them that their father was the devil, and that he (the devil) was a murder from the beginning.

He (the devil) was the original motivator, holding up a goal to Adam. By reaching for the goal, Adam fell from Paradise and began to die. Paradise was (and is) first a state of the mind. The soul, living in the timeless realm is patient. And the patient soul is able to pass on that patience to the body, in which benevolent time the body can flourish and accomplish good.

A society of graceful patient souls will, believe it or not, so affect the material creation as to create a Heaven on earth.

If you want to see the effect of reaching for goal on yourself, then simply set a goal—any goal. You will immediately experience a change of consciousness, a narrowing of focus, and impatient nervousness will be added. Simply sitting at a traffic light, nervously waiting for it to turn green, changes you from a graceful being to an impatient monster.

And no sooner is a goal introduced and pursued than impatience and nervousness lead to resentment and frustration. Next time you are waiting impatiently in line, just notice how quickly cruel thoughts and resentment pop up about the person ahead of you who is "holding up the line."

Set a goal of losing weight and you begin to deny your body life. Were you not nervous and resentful (through pursuing other goals) you would not have needed to comfort yourself or force-feed yourself with hurry-up concentrated food in the first place.

In hurrying to reach some other goal, you ate fast food because you had denied yourself the time to eat healthy and natural foods.

Incidentally, the same impatience is evident in the unnatural unbroken use of soil (instead of letting it lie fallow from time to time) and in the hurry up practice of hormone-pressured growth of livestock and poultry. Our impatient spirit, seeking to force things to growth faster and faster, pains the earth. Nature cries out for humans to have patience.

And were we to have patience, things would flourish. No creative genius, no character, no health ever developed through impatience. By setting goals, some athletes may have won a tinsel title, may have starved themselves into running faster, or may have grown muscles with artificial hormones, but such useless "accomplishments" contribute nothing of real value to humanity. Furthermore, they will eventually pay the piper for the abuse of their bodies.

Remember how a goal—any goal—leads to a denial of time, thus of love, and cruelly forces something to happen unnaturally.

The athlete who drives himself toward a goal is, in essence, subjecting his body to loveless impatience. It is a form of self-abuse. Later in life, the results will be obvious.

But the cruel motivators hide the truth from you. They do not show you the murdered souls, the regrets, the lost lives, and the ravaged bodies.

Every genius, every noble soul, every decent human being that ever was or will be became that way in spite of the murderous goal setters, pressure mongers, and motivators around him or her. If you are ambitious, it is proof positive that you are hypnotized into pursing some goal that someone else set for you.

Time is life. Pursuing goals is setting the cart before the horse. By setting goals for yourself or others, you are denying and seeking to eradicate time--the time it would have taken for the happy growth and development to occur naturally. Anything worthwhile--from growth, to discovery, to adventure--takes time, sometimes lots of time. And it is during this time that the soul grows and flourishes.

You will recognize this fact someday if you have been ambitious. The day will come when you discover that any title, degree, career goal, or material gain which you made too important is really nothing. The sweet and beautiful time you could have spent with your family is gone and gone forever—sacrificed on the satanic altar of goal reaching.

Impatience—denying others time—ruins every beautiful moment with your children. Because small children are closer to God than you are, they intuitively recognize the impatience as hatred.

The hell-bound motivators and time management experts are Satan's own. They tell you that by setting goals you will have more time. They lie. By setting goals, the soul falls to a lower consciousness, one apart from God, and one that is subject to the goal and to the fiend operating just beyond the material dimension.

Do you now see why there is futility at the end of each goal reaching cycle? It is because it was not YOUR goal in the first place. It was a goal set for you by some misguided person. They seduced or tricked you into pursuing it by making you upset, resentful, angry or willful. Once you took on the goal they gave you, emotion took over as the driving force. Later another round of resentment or frustration would reinforce that goal. After months or years of wasted effort, we often keep pursuing the goal just to try to eke some sorry benefit from it, to try to get some gain to make all our wasted time worthwhile. Then, not wanting to stop pursuing and experience the anxiety and guilt for what we have been doing, we rededicate ourselves to keep from being dead in the water. Such a person usually becomes a motivator—teacher, mentor or coach—tempting and pressuring others, as if to convince ourselves that we are right and good.

Yet others will taste of some material benefit in the form of money, power, or popularity (the devil is generous with his own) and now greed or lust takes over as the motivating force that compels pursuit.

We have all, to some extent or another, fallen victim of this process--even those of us who are not naturally greedy or ambitious . Here’s how we fall victim.

Once we became involved in this process, whenever a similar situation occurred or some post hypnotic cue in the environment was present, it cues the old programming as well as emotion (often fuelled by resentment) that impels us to act to ease the agony and pain.

Often we also experience a flashback to the original trauma scene, and here is where we make our big mistake. We resent what we see, what we have done, or what we begin to feel impelled to do.

We know we will fail again, and we resent it. But this resentment reinforces every aspect of the hypnosis and conditioning, and the resentment also separates us from the power of calm detached observation and patience, by which we could resist the programming.

Once the process begins, it is virtually impossible to stop without a thorough understanding of how you fell. Conditioning takes over. Soon the goal or object takes over the role of motivator. That is why women who motivated their husbands lose their husbands to work or money.

A man who hated his mother hated her cat because of the suggestion that she loved the cat more than him. Later in life, he transferred the love/hate relationship he had with his mother to cats. He tried to be nice to his cat. Then when it "betrayed" him, he got angry at it. Afterwards, he was nice to it out of guilt.

The original suggestion was probably wordlessly conveyed through his mother's cruel (she knew what she was doing) rejection of her son and lavishing of attention on the cat.

Yes, she probably did like the cat better. So, in this case, the suggestion was true. But why the sustained hatred of cats (together with false love out of guilt) 40 years later?

Just what is sustaining the aberrant behavior? Why does the soul not have the power to simply cancel the conditioning and substitute new responses, and through a new conditioning establish a new set of programming for the body?

The answer is one or both of two things: denial and/or resentment.

Let us look at each of these individually. First, denial. What is it that the man is denying? Chances are he is denying that his mother liked the cat more than him (and he was jealous of the cat), that his mother hated him, or he is trying to deny that he hated his mother.

Admittedly, these are difficult and troublesome things for a child to see and have to admit. But how about the adult child? He should be able to simply admit one or all of the above, let it go, and then go on with his life.

Leaving aside a sustaining resentment factor, let us look at the sheer denial itself. The reason he can't let go of it is because it is still too important to him. He cannot make it unimportant because his soul is still guilty for the hate. And not having found forgiveness through repentance, the soul is still struggling with and resenting the guilt, blaming first her and then himself.

Because he has not been able to let go of the blame, he cannot let go of the relationship with mother, alive or dead, or with things associated with her. He is struggling egotistically like a lost soul with his own guilt. He is looking for absolution and forgiveness from her (or from food, cats, or whatever is associated with mother).

When that object betrays him instead of relieving him, he is full of hatred and rage. The food betrays him (when it substitutes for mother's love) when it makes him fat instead of fulfilled. The cat betrays him when it likes anyone who will feed it, or simply by the fact that its love is not fulfilling. He feels empty and unloved (because of his resentment, which separates him from love within). But without understanding, he blames the cat.

Understand—I’m just using the cat as an example of how we transfer feelings toward some person to other people or objects.

Can you see why there can never be any fulfillment or closure in such transferences? Only God can forgive the soul and only He can make things right. It is a relationship with the Father that fulfills the soul. When the soul has made things right with the Father, then everything else pales in importance. After reconciliation with the Father through repentance, all that is left is to clear the air with others who have been used, if they are still alive, and then go on with life, free of the past.

When one is loved by the Father, it becomes easy to admit that mother did not love one because it becomes unimportant. And when one knows that one is forgiven by the Father, it becomes easy to admit that one did hate one's mother.

This brings us to resentment. Resent is the sustaining energy of unforgiveness. It is unforgiveness which blocks the soul from experiencing love and realizing the above facts.

Therefore it is important to watch for resentment and let go of it. Any resentment at all keeps alive the original suggestion which then draws rage or excitement, and by conditioning compels some behavior. The behavior is degrading, which draws more resentment and self-loathing. This leads to seeking absolution and oblivion in the bosom of the very person we hate or some associated object of comfort. The consolation prize, of course, is also degrading, which leads to even more resentment and self-loathing.

If you can let go of the resentment, then watch the compulsion and let it too pass; you will eventually be free of it. Continued observation of the conditioning will cause it to diminish and become non-operative.

Remember—the soul is supposed to rule the body. When the soul resents the body because of its compulsions and feelings, the soul is, in essence, rejecting the body.

And when the soul rejects the body, it is like a parent turning its back on its child. The alienated, disenfranchised, rejected child then looks for comfort and guidance from some other source, and this other source becomes that to which the body will respond.

Resentment of our own self is like a father disowning a child. After this act, the father loses rapport with the child. Perhaps he thinks that he can make the child obey when it

begs to be reinstated. But such a child is more likely to harden in defiance or in doing self destructive behaviors in order to hurt the parent and draw attention to the mistreatment.

Likewise the body, rejected by the resentful soul, by default comes under every other influence. It becomes out of control—sensitive, allergic, hysterical, and worse yet, under the malevolent influences that seek to capitalize on the rupture between the parent and child, or between the soul and body.

Next time you resent something—even your car for breaking down—notice an alienation which occurs. Notice how you have thoughts of selling it, abandoning it, destroying it, punishing it, or making it "pay" for what it did to you.

Resentment always draws ideas of hurting another (sometimes by hurting ourselves to "show them") or by rejecting them in return.

But when we reject another, it means that we have cut ourselves off from them. In essence this means denying their humanity. If a person is a real human being—how could you deny their humanity by treating them like an object? But that is exactly what we do.

Really humane treatment of others means remembering their humanity. It means not using them (for personal gain, pleasure, or hidden intent). It means not lying to them. It means not manipulating them, experimenting on them, or treating them like conditioned response animals.

A lady wrote a book in which she said we should listen to our bodies. You cannot really listen to another when you resent them. Nor can you listen to your body when you resent it (or its feelings and weaknesses). When you resent your body, you then try to force it to comply, often with the use of drugs, chemicals, surgery, radiation and poisons. We starve the body or fill it with artificial foods. We seek to mute and suppress its cries for help with alcohol, psychiatric meds, and a host of symptom removing chemicals.

The other wrong extreme is giving into the body, honoring it, and spoiling it. "Doing whatever comes natural." This is like the parent, who, having lost control of the child through harshness and cruelty, now tries to recapture the child through wooing it and giving in to it.

Our body needs neither punishment nor bribe. It needs neither austerity nor spoiling. It needs understanding. And by understanding, the soul will recognize true needs and the proper measure of giving and withholding.

Today, we live in a society which is cruel beyond belief. Our sick are rejected and abandoned to institutions where there are injected with chemicals, experimented on, and irradiated.

Our children are basically rejected by their selfish parents and abandoned to the cruel schools system, which views the children as so many minds to be stuffed. Obedience is extracted through bribe, punishment and the use of psychotropic drugs.

When children cry out for help, often by running amuck or by trying to draw attention to themselves, they are punished, medicated, or incarcerated.

Inner city youth are denied useful work. The homeless are hated; and in the alienating hate are then either rejected or catered to.

We often feed the sickness or respond to cries of help with even more cruelty from the heartless Godless penal, social service, psychiatric, and medical systems.

Believe it or not, most of our societal, psychological and even health problems have a basis in resentment. Horror chambers of electroshock "treatments," lobotomies, mind control and drug experimentation, and even the gas chambers of Nazi Germany are just a step beyond resentment and the subsequent use of methods to force compliance.

The more we resent our children, the more open we are to drug them and abandon them to cruel institutions. The more we resent and become impatient with our own bodies, the more we are inclined to seek symptom removal and soon thereafter, irradiating, poisoning or cutting away the rebellious part.

Resentment is always followed by an impulse to "get it over with." Soon we give in to the surgeon's knife, the institutionalization, or even thoughts of suicide or mercy killing.

You cannot understand what your own body is trying to tell you as long as you resent it. You cannot understand your children as long as you resent them.

And no—gurus, psychic guides, shrinks and shamans are not the answer. These authorities are just another false comfort and misguided answer which originates externally, at best, and often in the same hellish place as the original suggestion to err.

In order to get well, you must learn two things. First, you must learn how to meditate properly, so that your soul comes back under the authority and guidance of the Creator within through submission to conscience/intuition. Secondly, you must learn to be patient with others, with yourself and with your body.

Impatience is a sign of resentment. Resentment is a denial of love. And this denial of love is born of selfishness. Denial of love leads to cruelty to make the other respect, honor, love, need or obey you.

Impatience leads to punishment, to forced compliance, to bribery, and manipulation to seduce others into compliance. When these fail, impatience always leads to violence. The angry person may raise his fists. The resentful liberal socialist will drug, re-educate, lobotomize, or euthanize. There is always an iron fist in the velvet glove.

Harsh punishment and syrupy sweetness are both forms of cruelty, since both seek obedience and compliance.

Only in true love is there freedom. Only in giving up resentment and judgment is there patience.

Remember: in resentment, the impulse is to reject the other, to deny them love so as to manipulate them into coming around. Racism—hatred of Whites, Blacks, Jews, or any other race—is simply a cruel denial of their personhood. Abortion is a denial of the child's personhood.

When you deny your body's personhood, then it becomes an object of use. When it fails to comply, then we turn it over to Godless pharmacologists.

Remember—resentment is denying another time. The impatient person wants compliance now. Don’t be that source of impatient pressure to others.

Therefore, do not resent others or yourself. That way you will be given the patience (through grace) to give time to others and to your body. And in this benevolent time, the other person and your body will have time to heal.

When you observe another person pressuring you, stand back and watch out for resentment. It is through resentment that anger rises to fuel some foolish action or compensation. It is through resentment that we then feel guilty, and often do what they want out of guilt. So watch out for resentment. When you see it rise, just mentally stand back and observe it. Let it pass. And for heaven’s sake, don’t resent yourself either.

When you deny another time, you are denying them life. And so, when you are impatient—especially with your children—you are denying them life. If they don't rebel, they may conform. But their conformity will be to your hypnotic pressure. Remember, love operates through the benevolence of time graciously and freely given. In impatience, you are pressuring them to conform. When they do, it is to your hypnotic authority, and thus their conformity is in a state of hypnosis.

The hypnotic state is one of subjectivity to external pressures, influences and suggestions. Your pressure puts them into a trance; and you are actually setting them up to be subject to other pressure monger and impatient personas like yourself, and to the seductions and lies of the world.

Whether they conform to your impatience or to your bribes, they are being conditioned to respond to pressure. Soon everything in the environment will contain cues that trigger their compliance. If you pressure them to brush their teeth with impatience, their conformity or rebellion will set them up to conform or rebel to you, those like you, toothbrushes, toothpaste, or something else associated with dental hygiene.

Remember, the pressure source almost always includes some stated or nonverbal suggestion, such "as if you do such and such you will be a good or successful person," or "if you don't do such and such, you will fail, be poor, never get married" or whatever.

There is usually some object involved, some hypnotic point of fixation: and while the person is directed to look at the object, the suggestions are drummed into his mind.

In the hypnotic state, under the influence of another, everything becomes reversed. Instead of flowing out of what he or she realizes intuitively is wise, their behavior is in reaction to some external cue.

The person is then directed (commanded) what to do. In the example I gave of the parent pressuring the child to bush his or her teeth, the child is told to brush a certain way or a certain number of strokes. The child then does so in conformity in order to avoid the wrath of the parent, while at the same time the suggestions are now implanted. The child may now also brush their teeth to prevent the suggested dire prediction from coming to pass.

Later in life, the person may rebel against the notion of brushing teeth and allow his teeth to go to ruin. Then one day someone will make a comment that parallels the dire prediction of his mother or he might look in the mirror and see how bad his teeth look. At that point the dire prediction of his mother and the original scene come back to mind, and now he hates himself and discovers the prediction is coming true (because of his rebellion). In a fit of activity and with renewed goals of having clean teeth he might then become fastidious about his teeth.

But whether conforming or rebelling, all freedom is gone. He is subject to the original suggestion, and to behaviors to make it come true or prevent it from coming true.

Even in rebellion there is no freedom, because he is compulsive about not doing certain things. And this negativity is self defeating, often bringing to pass the very prediction that had been made.

On the radio, a lady told of how she had been raised by her lesbian mother. Somewhere the suggestion was made that she (the daughter) would become a lesbian too, “just like her mother.” Not wanting to be like her mother (who she resented), she began to engage in lots of sex with boys in her early teen years. She recalls being in a car with a boy and feeling no passion for him at all, but in her mind, she kept saying over and over: "see, I'm not like my mother, I'm not like my mother. I'm not like my mother."

This young lady did not really want to be promiscuous; she was seeking (in the wrong way) to counter the suggestion that she would become just like her mother.

Let's go over the ground one more time. When we fall away from awareness and from operating out of our own center of dignity, we fall into a trance (which may not be distinguishable from the fully awake state). We fall into a condition where we are subject to outside influences.

It is unfortunate that this sad condition is inflicted on us by our parents, teachers, coaches, and other authorities who want power over us, want us to obey, want to use us, or are simply selfish or misguided. But once we fall into a mild trance, it becomes easier to fall into another trance. As we go through life we begin to lose awareness more and more, falling into deeper and deeper trance states.

An enlightened psychiatrist once said that a schizophrenic was simply someone who has fallen into a deep state of hypnosis. I believe there is much truth to this statement. The deeper the trance, the more outside influences are able to create hallucinations, for example.

Our parents and other authorities who tease, pressure, bribe, and threaten us to get compliance are setting us up to come under other influences because of the hypnotic state their pressures throw us into. The parent who bribes and threatens the child, creating a conformist or rebel, is setting the child up to become subject to the peer group, the popular culture, cult leaders, manipulative leaders, as well as negative spiritual influences.

Everyone is always trying to influence everyone else. Into this sea of suggestion, the entranced conformist or rebel walks. His or her freedom is gone, and what he or she becomes is based solely on what influences he or she comes under and which influences are stronger. Growing up in a cannibal culture, the entranced person may become a “good” cannibal, in some other country perhaps a “good” Communist, and in the United States a “good” hypnotized Christian, progressive, or environmentalist.

In the trance state, especially the deeper ones, people also become subject to hellish influences, including voices and unseen pressures. These unseen but real presences are able to intrude upon us and influence us when we are resentful, upset, sick, excited, make something too important, or are hypnotized.

In order to be able to shake off these intruders and to disregard and be disobedient to their commands, you must learn to meditate properly, so as to become objective to thought.

In the meditative state, the soul is only subject to the Creator and to His Truth instead of to suggestion. The soul becomes subject to His wordless guidance, instead of external directives and cues, and to His love, instead of the sticky rapport with manipulative and confused people.

As far as earthly hypnosis goes, meditation will help bring you back to first a fully awake state, and then to the higher form of consciousness, called awareness. It is good to be fully awake and not in a trance state. But in order to become completely whole and free of external influences, you must also become aware, where you are subject to the Creator.

After you begin to wake up, watch out for two things: resentment and emotion. Resentment of other people or of circumstances keeps us hypnotized and subject to the world. Observing our subjectivity, we tend to reset ourselves for our vulnerability and gullibility. Learn to be patient with others, as well as with yourself. This will help keep you out of the trance state.

You must also learn to be patient about symptoms, memories, and problems that have arisen during your subjective state. Maybe you have forgiven your mom for what she did. But you must also not resent those who look like your mom, memories of past failures or current problems that arose from your conformity or rebellion to your mom. Nor must you resent health problems, such as overweight. Whatever you resent is given, by transference, the power to oppress you and control you.

Memories, for example, are impressions made on the subconscious during moments of sin. The memory might keep coming back to torment you; but it only has power over you because you resent it.

Let it all go. Observe people, memories, health problems, and even spirits with objectivity. Stand back and watch them without resentment.

It is resentment that makes you feel inferior. It is resentment that blocks you from realizing. And it is resentment that blocks you from realizing a solution to your problems.

Because you have been in a trance all your life, you have become subject to the world and its influences by way of emotion. Other people, their affections, their words, their actions, and their implications gained the power to move you emotionally. Now, unless you are careful, others will push the old buttons that bring about the motions that then compel you to act or go along.

Learn to be calm under pressure. Learn to observe people, places and circumstances with an attitude of friendly neutrality. The more distant and neutral you are, the less you are likely to get sucked into some emotional interchange or intrigue.

Some people (perhaps even your spouse) are experts at drawing you into an argument or intrigue. Their sole purpose (though they may not be aware of what they are doing) is to upset you and make you fall. That way, they don't have to feel inferior to you, and they may even be able to control you and draw energy from you.

Therefore, stand back. As soon as you find yourself tapping your toe to the music or getting pulled into an argument—stand back and let the feeling pass. That is why Christ said that sometimes we should just say "yea, yea" quickly and turn the other cheek (so as not to get sucked into an argument). He did not mean to be passive. He meant to be objective and not get sucked into some argument or feeling exchange. Many people are not sincere in their questions or arguments. They are probing for weaknesses they can exploit or they are trying to make you fall, so they can feel better. Beware.