Dr. Michael Ryce's lecture on "Healing Through Relationships"

This week we watched the first half of Dr. Ryce's lecture on the healing power of relationships. The lecture makes the point that relationships are not bad, broken, or diseased. Relationships are sacred tools which reveal to us what it is, inside each of us, that we have denied and suppressed. We deny and suppress things because they are painful or scary, and these are the things which will keep creating pain and fear in our lives until we own them, and dismantle them from our thought. Dr. Ryce suggests that the traditional purpose for relationships in our world has been to see how much stuff we can accumulate, and who can be proven to be "right". He offers that the way to begin using the healing power of relationships begins with adopting a new purpose for relationships; "I want to heal." This changes everything about how we approach relationships, and what we can learn from them.

Guy Finley states in his Seven Steps to Oneness program that: "Before we can change our experience of life, we must change our purpose for living."

This is a fundamental truth which arises from the awareness that we each create our own realities from the selective attention we place on the actuality of life which happens around us. When we choose a focus for our attention and we decide to set a goal or a purpose, that goal or purpose filters what we see, hear, and feel, and motivates our behavior in an attempt to accomplish that goal or purpose. Once we set a goal or purpose, it stays active in us until we achieve it or consciously cancel it. Therefore a goal or purpose can be driving our behavior, and experience, long after we have shifted our conscious awareness away from it and onto something else.

This makes it very important to consciously choose the purpose/goal we have for being in a relationship, and to frequently remind ourselves of that purpose/goal. When we do this with the understanding that we are creating our own experiences and our internal realities, and that no one else is causing any of our emotions, or thoughts, whether positive or negative, we can begin to make good use of the tool of relationship for healing those thoughts and emotions that "come up" within us that are less than Love. Dr. Ryce offers a tool for using relationships to heal at www.whyagain.com/commitment.php


We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.

Guy Finley's talk - Your New Authority Over Anything That Disturbs You!

Last night the Mindshifters group listened to the one hour audio lecture by Guy Finley, (www.guyfinley.com), before working on Reality Management worksheets. The purpose for this departure from our normal routine was that Dr. Ryce himself talks about how beneficial it is to hear the same message from a variety of different perspectives. If you hear about a new concept from several different sources and perspectives, it shortens the amount of time it takes you to integrate the material. It tends to produce more neural connections and can lead to more flashes of insight.

So with this in mind, we listened to Guy Finley discuss the ways in which everything that stimulates a disturbance in me is truly a gift. Every person, interaction, and situation which produces a disturbance in me is Revealing to me something about myself which I was unaware of, prior to the disturbance. He talks about the situation in which I am just having a wonderful day until someone gives me the wrong look, or criticizes me in some way. Then suddenly there is an irritable little person who erupts from me. I wasn't an irritable little person until that situation occurred. My immediate thought is that someone just put an irritable little person into me. I then blame the other person for what I am feeling, saying and doing.

The fact of the matter is that I had those irritable feelings and thoughts within me, long before the other person gave me the look, or criticized me. I was simply not aware of that irritation, because I had chosen to focus my awareness on other things. Just because I don't choose to focus my awareness on my frustration, irritation, anger, blame, guilt and shame, does not mean I don't have any of those thoughts, feelings and energies hiding in my mind/body energy system. And as Dr. Ryce so often points out, every dis-integrative energy in my energy system is wearing me down and will eventually cause physical dis-ease and eventually death, if it is not seen, acknowledged, and removed.

Guy Finley closed his talk with a description of how a disturbing event produces resistance within me, which could Reveal to me something about myself, which is keeping me from being in direct contact with all that I am. The key to this process is that I accept the Revelation and integrate the realization that I had this energy within me. The problem is that in our current culture and system, we are conditioned to reject the Revelation and lose the realization, but insisting that someone else or something else is responsible for the resistance we feel when we come into contact with a disturbance.

This is the heart of Dr. Ryce's Reality Management Worksheet, (www.whyagain.com) which steps a person through the process of identifying exactly how they are blaming someone or something else for the Reality they are creating in response to a disturbance in their lives. The worksheet helps a person reclaim their power, by taking responsibility for all that they are thinking and feeling, and by helping to uncover the hidden, deeper, projected parts of the mind, which are truly creating the discomfort.

Guy Finley states that with each disturbance we feel, the world is asking us, "Would you like to see what is keeping you from being closer to me?"

We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.

Dr. Michael Ryce Lecture: Did You Hear What I Think I Said?

The Mindshifters group spent the last two weeks watching the video lecture by Dr. Ryce about Response-Ability Communication. This lecture outlines a process of communicating which is built around Dr. Ryce's observations that we each create our own internal reality and that if we are in pain, we are in error. So this model for communicating is designed to allow me to let others know what reality I have created for myself, in a way which makes it clear that I know I have created this reality for myself. This means that I clearly transmit the message that I understand that no one else has done anything which created any discomfort in me.

This model of communication blends Dr. Ryce's awareness of how each of us creates our own pain and then projects that pain onto the image we create in our minds about the other people and situations around us, with solid communication skills which have been promoted by experts for centuries. The value of using a system like this is that it keeps me focused on the things I truly have control over, and this leaves me with the power to create change in my life.

The reason most of Dr. Ryce's lectures have such power is because, at some point in the process, they run counter to the way our traditional culture, or "common sense" would have us think or react. This lecture is no different. Most people think that effective communication is getting other people to agree with them, or believe what they believe, or to accept that what they did was wrong or somehow harmed us. The definition of communication which is given in this lecture is, "To accurately re-create the "reality" in my mind, in the mind of the person I am trying to communicate with." This can only be accomplished if it is known and agreed upon that I am completely responsible for everything that I think, feel, see and hear!

In this model of communication, when I tell the other person, "what I want", it is not about what I want from them or what I want them to change or do differently. In this model of communication when I tell someone "what I want", it is a statement of how I want things to change within me, which only I can do. It is followed by a request for support from the other person in my own process of changing the reality I am creating which is causing me pain.

When I realize that I am the only one who can cause my emotions and that any sense within me that another person has caused my emotions is simply a distraction driven by my fear about what I would have to look at within myself, I am opening a new door to limitless possibilities.

We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.