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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 1 year ago
When considering options on how to master life’s challenges, mindfulness may not immediately spring to mind or even be near the top of your list. However, after five decades spent researching and studying human behavior, I am certain that true mindfulness – seeing both sides of an individual or event simultaneously, can help you master your mind and master life’s challenges.
Let’s take a step back and look at what I believe to be the most authentic definition of mindfulness.
Suppose you were to meet someone in a social setting or work environment, and perceive them to have certain admired qualities or characteristics that you don’t perceive to be inside of you - physical looks, intelligence, wealth or even their social skills.
As such, you would tend to exaggerate them and put them on a pedestal, and minimize yourself by contrast in return. In other words, you are too humble to admit that the very traits you see in them, are also in you to the same degree.
Another way of putting it is that when you exaggerate them and lessen you, you disown those traits you see in them because you don’t see their traits as being part of who you are. And when you disown those traits, you have a dismemberment or deflection because you are unconsciously denying those traits in yourself.
Here’s why.
Whatever you perceive in others, you also have inside of you.
Many years ago, I grabbed the Oxford English dictionary and began circling or underlying every single human behavioral trait that I could find.
As I came across each one, I would try to think of someone who displayed that trait to the most extreme degree, and put their initials next to it. I would then look at myself to try and find ways in which I displayed the exact same behaviors to the same degree.
I went through 4,628 traits and discovered that I had ALL of them – each and every one.
I was nice at times. I was cruel at times. I was thoughtful and thoughtless, honest and dishonest, arrogant and humble. And I realized that it would be wise for me to own and embrace all these traits instead of trying to get rid of the ones that I perceived to be negative, wrong or bad and pretend to be only one sided.
This became the first step of what I would later call the “Demartini Method” – a method that I teach at the Breakthrough Experience program that I’ve been presenting for almost 35 years.
During my 2-day program, I take individuals through this exercise where, whatever traits they see in others, they look at where they do the same behavior to the same degree, quantitatively and qualitatively. This includes traits and behaviors that they perceive to be both positively admired or negatively despised.
I am certain that what you perceive in other individuals you have inside you. However, as I mentioned earlier, if you don't own it and are too humble or proud to admit it - you have a deflected or disowned part.
“Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things.”
Romans 2:1 ESV
That disowned part is like an emptiness inside that prevents you from having pure, fully reflective awareness of that individual.
As such, you're unlikely to truly connect intimately with them and instead you’re likely to have a disconnect because you don’t acknowledge that you have what you see in them.
The opposite also applies when you meet someone that you look down on. The reverse then takes place where you exaggerate yourself and minimize them. As such, you tend to be too proud to admit what you see in them inside you.
You have a deflected, disowned, and dismembered part. And any of those deflected parts keep you from having a real connection with them.
- When you admire someone, you’re conscious of their positive upsides and unconscious of their negative downsides.
- When you despise someone, you’re conscious of their negative downsides and unconscious of their positive upsides.
Anytime you minimize or exaggerate yourself, you are inauthentic.
Likely, you want to be loved for who you are as an authentic individual, but how are you going to be loved for who you are when you're not being who you are?
It is the same with others. How can you truly love and honor others if you're not seeing both sides of them and are instead judging them based on your subjective biases and disowned parts?
Those disowned parts keep you from being fully conscious. You’re only seeing the part you may consciously or unconsciously want to see instead of what is whole. That is not mindfulness.
Mindfulness emerges when you see both sides simultaneously in the individual.
You may not believe that it’s possible to be conscious of both sides of an individual simultaneously, but with proper questioning and accountability you can.
This simultaneous pair or opposites is easy to see if you spend a little time being honest with yourself about yourself and about all the people who in your perception initially challenged or supported you.
When you initially only perceive one side you will eventually have sequential oscillating feelings and emotions about other people. Sometimes you may feel like hugging them, and at other times feel like slugging them. And back and forth it goes – like and dislike, hug and slug. It oscillates.
However, in a moment of simultaneous awareness or true love and grace where you actually perceive both their up and down sides together, you have mindfulness and an enlightened mind. Instead of being in the dark with unconscious information, you actually have pure or full reflective awareness, where the seer, the seeing, and the seen are the same.
Now you're mindful.
The quality of your life is based on the quality of the questions you ask. The Demartini Method involves asking quality questions to help balance your perceptions and thereby balance your mind.
When it comes to individuals or the events in your life that you judge, if you ask questions that make you conscious of what you were unconscious of, you will transform your judgments into love and gratitude. When you do, you’ll become present, have reflective awareness, and for that moment, experience what it is to be truly mindful.
In moments of mindfulness, you’re not perceiving support or challenge alone, you’re not seeking what you infatuate with or avoiding something you resent.
When you put someone on a pedestal, infatuate with them and you’re blind to their downsides, you activate your parasympathetic nervous system.
This, in turn, induces symptomatology of affection that makes you want to seek that individual. It tends to lead you to become juvenilely dependent on them. This is not your most empowered state.
When you perceive you are challenged by someone, you put them in the pit, resent them and you’re blind to their upside, you activate your sympathetic nervous system. This results in a fight-or-flight state in order to avoid it. This leads you to become precociously independent from them. Again, this is not your most empowered state.
So, anytime you perceive a support without a challenge or a challenge without a support; or infatuate and are blind to the downside or resent and are blind to the upsides; you're likely to be disempowered.
However, the moment you're mindful and perceive both sides equally and simultaneously, you become more resilient, adaptable, expand your space and time horizons, and activate the executive center in your brain where you're more objective, empowered and master of your destiny.
It’s for this reason that I spend time teaching the Demartini Method in the Breakthrough Experience to train people to take anything they put on a pedestal or in a pit, which results in them minimizing exaggerating themselves, which is inauthenticity, and transforming it until they have equanimity within themselves and equity between others.
This is where you tend to have the most sustainable fair exchange in relationships, either in business or socially.
It’s where your brain fires in the most efficient way, and where you tend to activate your genius, innovation, creativity and original thinking.
It’s also when your physiology is likely to have autonomic regulation, which results in you having the most resilience, adaptability and wellness.
That’s the experience of true mindfulness.
Wilhelm Wundt describes in his work over a hundred years ago, that an individual who has simultaneous contrast liberates themselves from the survival emotions, which allows them to thrive.
This is as opposed to sequential contrast – those times when you perceive positives without the negatives, and then later you perceive the negatives without the positives.
For example, when you’re first in a relationship with someone and see only the things you like in them, only to later break up and see an excess of all the things you dislike in them.
When you see both sides simultaneously, that is when you truly know and are able to truly love that individual.
For example, if I was to come up to you and say, “You're always nice, never mean. Always kind, never cruel. Always generous, never stingy. Always giving, never taking. Always considerate, never inconsiderate. Always peaceful, never wrathful. Always positive, never negative,” your intuition would let you know this is untrue and that you have another side to you.
If I said, “You're always mean, never nice. Always cruel, never kind. Always negative, never positive. Always wrathful, never peaceful. Always stingy, never generous. Always taking, never giving. Always inconsiderate, never considerate,” your intuition would once again remind you of your other side.
However, if I said, “Sometimes you're nice, sometimes you're mean. Sometimes you're kind, sometimes you're cruel. Sometimes you're positive, sometimes you're negative. Sometimes you’re peaceful, sometimes wrathful,” your intuition would immediately say with certainty that is true.
So, you have more certainty in a balanced or mindful state. You have more presence in a mindful state, more gratitude, more love, more inspiration, and more enthusiasm.
It’s also where you perceive a hidden order in your life and that you're not disordered, reacting and surviving, but instead being proactive and thriving.
When you live congruently with your very highest values, you tend to be more objective, more likely to perceive simultaneous contrasts, and more likely to experience a mindful state. It’s in this mindful state that you tend to be the most resilient and adaptable, and able to master life’s challenges.
See, if you're infatuated with something, you’re likely to fear it's loss. If you're resentful of something, you're likely to fear its gain. However, if you're neutral and can see both sides simultaneously, you tend to have no fear of loss or gain. Instead, you are able to live in a world of transformation, adaptation, resilience, and equanimity.
If you ask quality questions to help you become conscious of what we're unconscious of, able to see simultaneous contrast, and can objectively transcend the subjective biases that keep you in survival mode, you can transform and master your life.
To sum up:
It doesn’t matter what you’ve been through in your life – I am certain that by learning quality questions, and brining your unconscious conscious you can guide yourself to a mindful state.
The quality of your life depends on the quality of questions you ask yourself.
The “noise “in your brain is an accumulation of judgments that are subjectively biased, due to incomplete awareness, and mindless states.
The Demartini Method will help you dissolve the very empty mindless states that keep you from being in that mindful state because anything you infatuate with or resent, occupies space and time in your mind and runs you.
I’d love you to join me at my Breakthrough Experience so I can teach you the Demartini Method to help you become mindful. I’d love to show you how to step out of the subjective, biased world where you distort reality, live with infatuations, resentments, prides, shames, frustration, polarized emotions and deal with low priorities which then result in your being distracted.
A focused mind, a real clear mind and a mindful state is one that is actually able to see both sides of life simultaneously. It's the ultimate objective of personal development and the key to the essence of your being.
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