Why are core issues so important? Well, imagine a small motorboat with a 2,000-pound anchor lowered into the water. It’s not going anywhere.
Core issues as Linda Dillon calls them, or root vasanas as I’ve called them in the past, are like 2,000-pound anchors on us.
As long as we don’t get them up and out of ourselves, we cannot get the boost to let go into the higher vibrations.
Let’s have a look at what core issues are.
A core issue, or what I’ve called a root vasana, has these features:
- An earlier, traumatic event.
- The memory of all the actions, words, sights, sounds, smells or any other phenomena that impressed themselves on us relative to the event.
- A conclusion that was reached.
- A decision that was made.
- An automatic behavior pattern that was created in response.
- The memory of all related incidents down through time.
My mother was once beaten unconscious by my Dad. The first time it happened I was around eight years old and I concluded that my Dad was a monster. I decided to hate him and I said to myself that I could not help her at that moment but I would one day.
The beating is the earlier, traumatic event.
That my Dad was a monster was my conclusion. Other common conclusions that people reach out of their trauma are that you can’t trust anyone, everybody leaves me, no one loves me, etc.
That I would always hate my Dad and that I had to help my Mom some day were my decisions.
My response was an automatic behavior pattern of rescuing women. Whenever I saw a women being attacked, I waded in.
And now I’ve created a Gender Equality Project to end gender inequality and persecution on the planet. That too is in response to vowing to help my mother some day. S0 there are upsides and downsides to a core issue.
But the rescue script gets me in plenty of hot water. Women may not want to be protected. I lose my neutrality and get emotionally hooked and triggered when I see violence happening. There are all kinds of ways I leave my center, my balance, and get hooked. And when I get hooked, nothing works.
There are so many ways being taught today to manage and eradicate our core issues that people have a range of choices.
One that I like is to find a really great listener (very rare these days) and talk about it until the lightbulb goes on.
Another is to process it. That means naming the feeling you feel, because memories are stored in the mind in file drawers under the name of the feeling.
Then experience the feeling and ask the obedient mind to send you a word or picture that identifies where this feeling originated.
Take the first word or picture offered and go back to the incident in your mind and experience it through completely. The core issue will let go a little more each time you do this and you get faster at doing it.
Another approach is to tell the truth about how you feel, what you know, etc. The truth will set you free. On the macrolevel of existence, it sets you free from the wheel of life and death. On the microlevel, it sets you free from the upset, unwanted condition or core issue.
Actually that’s not quite true. Very few core issues yield to a single session’s work. We keep having to dig deeper into them because our experiencing of them is not that deep.
It might take an incident such as a mother lifting a car off her child to reach down deeply enough and release oneself from one’s own belief and get the job down. The job would be to get underneath the core issue.
There are other things that can be done. One is to solicit feedback. Ask people how they perceive you. Try on what they tell you. Test it out. See if it fits.
If it fits, own it. “Yes, I can be a jerk at times.” “Yes, I get stingy when I run low on money.” Acknowledging our own failings only hurts for a few seconds. And then we’re free of the pain and that way of being.
Once we raise our unworkable patterns, core issues, etc., to awareness, they become an order of magnitude more difficult to run on others. Again we emerge, emerge, emerge from the house that core issues built, which I’ve called the constructed self.
What the body does with our core issues is to create muscular tension in the body appropriate to the issue. If we’re belligerent, we may be clenching our hands a lot. If we feel suppressed, we may be clenching our jaw. If we feel people to be a pain in the neck or a pain in the ass, guess what?
When our muscular tension goes up, our awareness goes down. Just at the time when we needed our awareness, we don’t have it. Telling the truth releases the muscular tension from our bodies by revisiting our response to the original incident and experiencing what needs to be experienced to bring release. What fazed a youngster may not faze an adult so it may be much easier as an adult to complete the experience of a core issue. And the energies also help.
We are nowadways emerging, expanding, adding on, adding on, adding on. We’re entering a brave new world, truly. And what we leave behind are our core issues.