Punishment Vs Discipline

(Keep in mind the punishment dealt from the Residential Schools, prison systems, your own life, ect while reading this article)

The underlying message of punishment is “You can’t do this, you are bad for doing this”, while discipline says “This is what you can do. You can take pride in doing this”. Discipline delivers the message that punishment fails to get across – that one should make the best decisions for themselves and take responsibility for their actions.

Discipline retains people’s sense of choice and control. Depression and anger comes from feeling we have no choice and makes people feel like helpless victims or (dangerous) cornered wolves.

The root word for discipline is disciple or follower. This means you discipline through being the example without forcing anyone. By being the example without pressure (but providing necessary guidance of course), often people then make the best choices or even make other equally positive choices through positive Observational Learning.

The result is a developed self esteem and strong sense of identity and integrity. This sets the foundation that will enable people to aim high and achieve much with their lives. And when they get to that position, they can say “I did this, I made this happen. This is what I wanted to do”. This gives more sense of choice and control over life and pleasure which results in self esteem and happiness.

Happiness, joy, depression and aggression are directly controlled by your sense or lack of control over your pleasure and quality of life. If you feel like your life and future will only cause pain and you have no choice in the matter, you become either depressed or angry. We then look to steal, take, force or buy happiness at any cost. The result is drugs, alcohol, crime and violence.

When one feels like they have no control, one either passively suffers with depression or aggressively fights and resists in an attempt to regain control. Either choice only causes more negative situations, now and later, which then only compounds those bad feelings even further. This is where the downward spiral begins.

Your Ego is then created or strengthened for a sense of stability in a seemingly unpredictable, uncontrollable and hostile world. Ego causes the need to measure up to some external result, image or condition for a sense of identity, security and happiness.

The problem is that nothing external is forever. That means your Ego cause you suffering when things inevitably don’t go your way. Self esteem doesn’t need those external things to provide happiness. It’s all internal and completely under your control... your complete choice. You just need to understand how it’s created and sustained.

Principles, values, knowledge of Laws [cause and effect] and proven strategies provide the missing inner foundation for happiness, security, success and self esteem. All the rewards of taking responsibility over our inner life are wealth and fulfillment.

This is how to take further choice and control over your happiness and success – control that is not dependent on anything or anyone else. The upward spiral then begins – each accomplishment feeds into and magnifies the next and you become the sole creator of your happiness, respect and wealth.

To further add to the rewards, when one begins to get pleasure from taking the right actions, it adds the fuel and motivation needed to achieve many great things for ourselves and others. All these right actions flow naturally from living our Life Purpose. Living our Purpose then creates even more wealth, health, love and fulfillment.

But because of modern society and the Residential Schools, that negative Observational Learning has blinded people to these liberating facts. When you are so used to seeing life one way, it’s at first difficult to see it in another way – even if that way is more beneficial.

Permanent change is made possible considerably faster through guidance from mentors. This mentoring saves years of failure and frustration from not knowing where the obstacles and pitfalls are. Sometimes people try to change only to be met with failure after frustrating failure. A good mentor can eliminate this failure for good and speed the whole process up tremendously.

The tribal system we once had, made use of processes of change that have been refined over more than 10,000 years. Role models in the community provide the example and influences and improves the lives of the next generation through positive Observational Learning. This is why “it takes a village to raise a child”.

Constantly improving yourself helps tremendously because perfection is an illusion. Perfection makes our life situation a constant disappointment and makes your happiness dependent on things beyond your control and your sense of choice.

A healthy and satisfying view to life is aiming for excellence in your passion and Life Purpose. You may fall down and fail, but the goal is mastery, not a lack of failure (which is nearly impossible). Happiness then becomes the Journey, not some distant Destination that never will be reached. Your Purpose is everything you really want in life and in our day and age you can find nearly unlimited ways in expressing that purpose for the benefit of all of society. That kind of value is what people pay good money for.

This is also were your creativity comes into play. When you feel good about who you are, you allow your natural talents and gifts to come through. Your Purpose, self chosen values and soul’s creativity flourishes because you no longer holding onto those Egoic ways of judging yourself. You allow your true self to be and create new things of benefit for society. This is what’s really valuable to people because it’s so “rare” and “unique”. Modern society prevents many people from being their true selves.

Living your Purpose allows you to live in complete happiness, fulfillment and wealth. Money, those pieces of paper with ink on them, is simply used to exchange value. Your Life Purpose and passion naturally adds to the wellbeing of society – which is value for others and is why you can literally create huge amounts of wealth. Anyone can develop their talents and be given money in exchange for the valuable end result. But to stop growing to is to stop the natural flow of life and ‘death’ occurs. Muscles not exercised break down.

It’s common for people to feel bad when they realize they were working in the wrong direction or to think that they’re lives just got more complicated. In reality, their lives are complicated because of working against the laws of life for so long. Getting leverage means to do more with less and less. You just have to understand how it works and use it in the key areas.

But a lot of people never even realize these things and die unfulfilled and incomplete. You could possibly save yourself from literally decades of needless pain and suffering. And you can do so by taking advantage of the experience and knowledge of mentors who’ve already taken years to get there (saving you years of frustration and struggle). Your level of success, ultimately, is completely your choice.

How The Residential Schools REALLY Affect Aboriginals

Conditional love says, "I'll love you if you act in X way, or do X, but will despise Y behavior or if you act like this". When we punish people out of love, they only feel hatred. Acceptance and forgiveness isn't dependent on conditions, but simply understanding, patience, and unconditional love. We can only love unconditionally when we 1. love and understand ourselves unconditionally which allows us to 2. accept our life conditions and 3. accept others unconditionally. We're able to accept because we are able to understand and see the truth.

Thinking, "Well, this person did X to me, so now I feel bad and I'm justified in wanting to hurt them back." or when others judge us for our actions, we shouldn't hate or judge them back. Why? Because both parties aren't really choosing to do those things. No one wants or chooses to hurt those they love most, live with depression, alcoholism, unemployment, violence, hate or crime (evident when many Aboriginals say, "I hurt those I love the most, I don't want to but can't seem to change no matter how hard I try" and "I can't seem to quit drinking even though I want to"). All actions have a positive intention - drinking, to end pain and laugh - suicide, to end the pain of living - crime, to get money - drugs, to feel good and numb the pain, ect. The people that stay victims to their circumstances are simply unaware of their choices and how to achieve them. Give these people a new understanding and they'll choose different ways of living and finding happiness - ways that are in line with what they truly want.

We are not our thoughts, beliefs, or actions, for they can and do change over time. What we are is our basic awareness or soul - that which feels, judges, knows, and thinks. Our actions, beliefs, thoughts, ect, come from our awareness and how we interpret everything and the world around us. "Nothing is neither good or bad - but thinking makes it so" - Shakespeare. The way we interpret the world comes largely from our upbringing since we aren't able to think for ourselves in order to survive as infants and children. We have no control over what we are taught as children (we never chose it), that comes from our parents who learned everything from their parents, or in the case of all Aboriginals, the Residential Schools.

The Residential Schools forced us to learn conditional love and learned helplessness, among other forms of negative thinking that are the cause of our condition (notice that suicide is the number one cause of death of Aboriginals age 13-30). The Residential Schools took away our basic choice of who we want to be, who we think we are, what we want, and what we do. This means we are asleep - unconscious.... acting out scripts and behaviors handed to us from those who attempted to destroy us. It's time to wake up and make our own decisions based on unconditional love, acceptance, understanding, correct principles and truth.

When we accept, love and understand others not based on their actions but for who they are beneath their unconscious "decisions", they honor and respect us back (the core of unconditional love). As parents, our children then do as we say because they feel our love for them in all it's fullness and truly see we only want the best for them. They feel our love and respond back with love (we give the world what's within us).

Loving children unconditionally allows them to feel their inherent worth as a person. This means they would no longer need to succumb to peer pressure nor rebel for a sense of control because they don't need to in order to feel good about themselves. They don't need everyone's approval anymore because they have their own acceptance - acceptance from knowing that they are good enough. Conditional love makes one feel like they're not good enough, so they copy what others say is good - substituting someone else's choice for their own. But when they are confident in their ability to make the right choices in life (which they can only see when loved unconditionally), they then make their own decisions to what's truly important to them, not what others say is 'cool' or what necessarily feels good in the moment - allowing them to endure pain of working towards worthwhile goals.

Unconditional love transforms all who come into contact with it - a transformation that we cannot get through punishment, deal making or rewards (which all imply doing something that someone else chose for them). When we have unconditional love for our children, they tend to judge themselves and hold themselves to a higher standard than we ever could. This standard is of their own choosing - this gives them a sense they are capable of choosing the best for themselves because they are inherently good enough as is. This builds confidence, identity and self respect - self respect makes them feel deserving the best in life which allows them to work for what they know they're worth... they don't wait for someone or something to give them happiness (such as Welfare, drugs, alcohol, a person, money, fame, or some other external event that never provides lasting happiness or fulfillment).

This doesn't mean that one would make all the wrong decisions for themselves (like drinking, drugs, crime, gangs, ect) simply because one only pursues those things when they feel they can't find inner fulfillment and happiness elsewhere (which in itself limits their sense of choice and sense of ability to achieve the goals which they choose). People's sense of ability to achieve their goals is limited only to their choice to seek the understanding that will enable them to achieve their goals - this takes the power from external conditions, gives it back and empowers them (this implies one can do anything as long as they choose to do so).

Unconditional love and understanding towards one's self is self esteem. Self esteem doesn't depend on conditions - it's doesn't depend on whether we are successful or not, on our appearance, status, respect from others, acceptance from others, our accomplishments, our past, material possessions, money, our job, or any other external condition. This is why many who strive to attain those things only end up feeling empty and unfulfilled (consider Kurt Cobain). Ironically, by cultivating self esteem and unconditional acceptance of ourselves, others, and our life's conditions, we achieve those outer conditions faster and in more abundance in ways we would have never considered when we lacked self esteem.

It's through sharing what's within us that provides our fulfillment, not the achievement of external conditions. Keep in mind that we then enjoy those external conditions only because we simply see them as a reflection of our level of inner fulfillment. This fulfillment doesn't require the recognition of anyone else - for it is ours and ours alone... no one can give it to us nor can anyone take it away (meaning we also can and may lose those external conditions but we'll never lose our sense of inner fulfillment). This is also why this fulfillment is present even when faced with "failure" (failure is merely a lesson of what doesn't work), and enabled the greatest people in history to never give up and be willing to die for what they believed in. They knew that what they had within them was greater than anything the world could throw at them. They understood the only true failure was to allow things, people, emotions or external events destroy and control their thoughts, values, beliefs, purpose, and integrity. "Extraordinary men build a firm foundation with the bricks others throw at them"

This also means we should no longer feel guilty for our past mistakes, past mistakes of our parents or past events that caused us to hate ourselves - for if we just knew how to get the result we wanted, we would choose to do so. And just because some uncontrollable, unchosen external event prevented what we wanted, it's no reflection on who we are or what we intended. We are not our actions, thoughts, beliefs or results... but we are responsible for them since only we can think for ourselves.

Basing our happiness and sense of self worth on external conditions is where our unhappiness comes from (also where conditional love originates). Nothing in this world is forever... all things and people will change towards us, causing pain, or they will leave us and it's absence will cause pain. It's true people will eventually die and it will cause us to be unhappy but we can still be at peace with it and accept it (even when faced with our own death).

Acceptance of all that is instantly ends the pain and it's power over us. When it's too hard to accept something, we may feel it's important to hold on to whatever it is that prevents us from letting go. We simply have to redirect our focus or change our perception - for all events conform to the way we choose to see them. "Nothing is neither good or bad - but thinking makes it so". Paradoxily, by letting go we then have the power to influence change. There are many proven ways to do this, which I will be sharing with people through my workshops and presentations.

Truth is gentle, it uplifts and inspires. If someone believes or thinks something that hurts or angers themselves or anyone else, then what they believe isn't true or isn't the full truth. "The truth shall set you free... but first it'll tick you off or scare the hell out of you" This happens because we sometimes cloud the truth with our own negative perception of what that truth means... this causes us to not accept it. When we add new meaning or don't see the whole truth, it makes it false - only false thoughts cause pain and anger. Truth is gentle. The minute we grasp the undistorted truth, it heals us and our wounds.



My goal is to get this message to all Aboriginals before the crises which is to affect us within 5-15 years. The Canadian government will soon remove our treaty rights and we'll have to pay for our own medication, schooling and infrastructure. The reason is because we are the number one growing population and within 10 years would be costing the government billions in the form of medication and hospitalization. The government also included a clause in the Residential School settlements that says Aboriginals can no longer ask the government for help reversing the effects that the Schools caused. So when we attempt to approach the government for help for our elderly and our youth (who are killing themselves through drugs, suicide, and solvents), Canadian society and government will not allow it. "We threw billions of dollars at you people already" they'll lament. I know this because they already feel this way towards us. I don't say that to judge them because I know if they understood the truth some would offer to help.

© Copyright 2008 7th Generation Consulting Enterprises

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