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My Dear Friend, I hope this finds you in beauty and happiness. In teaching the Native Americans, I was very surprised to find out that they have in their culture one particular belief that I encountered in other cultures. An Indian friend described it to my boyfriend and I over dinner at an Indian restaurant recently. "If one member of society does well, he won't get too far: someone else will pull him down again. It's called "crab technology." I was amazed. A Mexican had told us a joke describing Mexicans just the same way. It's the image of crabs in a bucket: if one starts to make it out, the others pull him down! This appears to me to be a group-perpetuating cultural negative belief. It is so detrimental to the whole culture...and it's an accepted belief! If you have a chance to work with a whole group using TAT, you can end a cultural belief like that with the whole group. You may find it in yourself or something like it. You can try it on yourself first and see if it works for you. Just think about what everyone says about your culture or gender or religion as a group and find out what applies to you and your group. Then liberate yourself from those negative group beliefs with TAT. I grew up Jewish and being worried was considered one of the successful approaches to living. I did TAT with Step One something like "I have to worry all the time." For the Native Americans, we did as Step One "It's not OK to be happy or to have anything better." That was what they offered to me as a typical attitude. That about sums up crab technology except for the part about keeping everyone else in line. I also recently found a belief I had which was something like "God is not beautiful because God has no existence (more like is beyond existence)." But, now that I've changed, I relate to all of existence as God, besides God being beyond existence. And God is the essence and expression of beauty for me. Well, darling friends, I wish you happiness and peace and beauty...which is simply your unobstructed Divine Self. Love,
Tapas
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