Learn from a rival's positive points

Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his wife, had perished--but he, prisoner number 119,104, had lived. In Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl describes the importance of finding meaning in suffering. The prisoners in the camps lost everything--their families, their liberty, their former identities, and their possessions. Many, as a result, concluded that they had nothing more to live for and abandoned hope. In order to be the salt to God/love's water, fear must be completely absent. Said another way, the absence of fear is equal to the fullness of the experience of pure love. In truth, the path of fear chasing unfolds like an ocean wave of life. Once you are fearless, you may ride the wave in its entirety. Love is the powerful root potential in everything. All is made of love. Even fear is made of love potential. I bring you this message about fear and fear chasing so that you might be reminded of fear's attributes and so that you might experience how beautifully your life unfolds after all fear is transmuted into Love. On the other side of all fear, the soul that is genuinely fearless can't help but share the love it experiences with those around them. I encourage you to dig deep and rise to the challenge of fear chasing and share your love with the world. If you have ever suffered a betrayal from a partner who then asked you to forgive his deception, you can easily understand the profound meaning of all this: Not only have you inflicted the pain of betrayal but now you are also asking me for the effort to decide to forgive you. When we are in this position, we feel again that they have faced us with a situation that does not have a correct answer: if we decide to forgive we will obtain external approval, we will silence a problem, but we will not silence that part of us that does not want to grant forgiveness or at least does not want to do it yet. We feel that we are giving pleasure to others but not to ourselves, again the ancient wound of those who have been codependent and for a lifetime felt the need to give without understanding the right to receive, without a shared pleasure. When we have suffered an offense within an important relationship, what makes us feel better is not the granting of forgiveness but the obtaining of compensation. It is fulfilling to feel how our body vibrates differently listening to the music of the words that flow as they ask you for forgiveness, phrases that vibrate in harmony with your interior from growing dystonia to the melody of love: I have betrayed you.

I made a mistake everyone can make, now it is useless to stay here to fight, please forgive me and let's forget it. I know I have betrayed you and it grieves me to have caused you so much suffering. I don't know if I deserve your forgiveness but at least allow me to compensate for the evil I did to you by doing this for you. In the two sentences, whoever speaks to you wants to achieve the same thing, wants to obtain your forgiveness and all in all none of the four is lying to you. But a nonprofit was another story. I had a lot to learn. That's when a burst of grace and serendipity led me to meeting Michelle and becoming part of Mother's Grace. Michelle and I fell in love with each other right from the start. Not only was she going through her own cancer at the time, but her son was ill, too, with juvenile diabetes, which is a dangerous thing for sure. She understood me, not only the hurt I was feeling from seeing Amanda go through chemotherapy, but the extreme anxiety and fear that never goes away from seeing your child in pain and not being able to do anything about it. Both of us had experienced that unbelievable level of frustration and disappointment, the feeling that, Shit, something has got to be done because how ridiculous it is for people to suffer like this, anyone, but especially your own child. Luckily, I have a few friends like Michelle, and you only need a few good ones to get by. I refer to them as my journey walkers, the genuine friends who can fight the fight and walk the walk as they go deep on the journey with you. We have to hold one another's hands because life is hard. But some continued to believe their lives were meaningful. Frankl saw that the prisoners who found or maintained a sense of meaning, even in the most horrendous circumstances, were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. Those who had a reason to live, he argued, were even more apt to survive in the face of starvation, sickness, exhaustion, and the general degradation of camp life. Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps, and in his article he tells the story of two suicidal inmates he counseled there. Like many of the people around them, these two men believed that they had nothing left to live for. In both cases, Frankl writes, it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them;

For one man, it was his young child, who was still alive. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of articles that he hoped to finish writing. As Frankl observed more and more inmates, he saw that those men and women who knew the why for their existence, as Nietzsche put it, could withstand almost any how. He was also struck by how some people were able to maintain their dignity despite the dehumanizing conditions by choosing how to respond to the suffering they faced and saw others endure. PRACTICAL APPLICATION Various things happen in life: weather phenomena occur, physical challenges take place, roles change, and relationships seem to begin and end. When you are fearless, you will hear others proclaim their fears. While out in public, you may hear someone say, I am afraid of public speaking, or I am terrified of spiders, or I hate people who ___________. Can you hear the fear (and love's potential) in those statements? Can you allow the Self to be in love with their fears? They are pointing that person to their ultimate peace. What a marvel! That person has received an invitation to his or her freedom from the word resounded through their own voice! You may also smile inside as you notice how that person just said or did what he or she said they had feared. In different ways, they are recognizing a mistake and asking for forgiveness. But, the vibration that each of the two sentences causes us inside is very different. Most likely, if codependency continues to whisper in your ear not to abandon it, you will want to forgive both of them. My invitation is to linger unhurriedly in the messages of your body, your heart, your belly as you read or listen to those people who ask for your forgiveness. If you pause to think about the importance of choice and the importance of shared pleasure, only the second one can be forgiven in name shared pleasure: the partner will have the pleasure to compensate for his or her mistake, you will have the pleasure to give the partner the gift of your forgiveness. Both of you are choosing to do something for yourselves and the others.

When we feel the pleasure to forgive our offenders, it means that offense can no longer affect us: It's now part of the past. It's a very important sign of healing. When we are able to declare I don't care when we feel that Now, it's not important , in that precise moment, we are stronger persons, we are another person, and it's powerful and wonderful. But there is another and even more important forgiveness than the one given to our offenders: forgiving ourselves for our imperfections. Sometimes we're too busy to even notice how hard it is. It's very hard. You have to keep picking yourself up, and it's the people that you pick yourself up with that get you through it. Michelle and I are both on a mission to help families and not everybody understands us. Sometimes we're too passionate or opinionated. But it's the passion that connects us and brings us to the other side of trauma, wherever that leads us. Dealing with trauma and tragedy has given me the empathy and compassion I need to feel love and patience for others, but it's not going to rule me. This entire saga of loss and pain and suffering has brought me to a different place. Part of my belief is that we can take our experience into the future, that horrible things happen, and we may never let go unless we work at it. But we can take those experiences and turn them into good if we can really look at them and ask how we can help someone else through a similar experience. We who lived in concentration camps, he wrote, can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms--to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. Before his arrest, Frankl had established himself as one of the leading psychiatrists in Vienna. His interest in psychology and meaning had been intense and precocious. When he was about thirteen years old, one of his science teachers declared to the class, Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation. But Frankl would have none of it.

Sir, if this is so, he cried, jumping out of his chair, then what can be the meaning of life? A couple of years later, he struck up a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and sent Freud a paper he had written. Freud, impressed by Frankl's talent, sent the paper to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis for publication. During and after medical school, Frankl distinguished himself even further. He did his fear in real time! He actually spoke publically! She spoke her fear, making it conscious on some level. DEATH AND DYING People may say, I am afraid of death, or I am afraid to die. When you are fearless, you understand fear, and simultaneously, you are in love with it. Because you'll find that you will love to die. Because you will have felt the realization that the only death that is possible is the death of temporary illusions. Anything that is temporary has a starting point. Temporary things also have an end point. Self-forgiveness let us compensate ourselves for our self-demanding and for suffering the negative results of our codependency. Moreover, if we feel the pleasure to forgive ourselves and the part of ourselves we don't like, it means that codependency can no longer affect us as it is becoming part of our past and our new present is starting. Once we have unmasked our ancient triple pact, once we are accordance with our love and self-love, once we have forgiven ourselves and those who deserved it, once we understand the importance of identity, ours and each of the important characters in our lives, once we understand the reasons of the relationships that have built our identity, we are ready to fly away. Fly away not only from the condition of codependency but from any condition of suffering due to toxic relationships. Putting Our Body in a Position to Change When we choose to change, it is natural and correct to visualize in our mind the changes we are about to face from a mental, psychological, spiritual, and emotional point of view.