RA 11567 "Expanding Jurisdiction of Lower Courts"

 RA 11567  - "Expanding Jurisdiction of Lower Courts"

(signed July 30, 2021 by President Duterte)

 

President Duterte signed Republic Act No. 11576, which amends the Judiciary Reorganization Act of 1980, or the Batas Pambansa Blg. 129. last July 30, 2021

 

first level courts (MTCs) jurisdiction:

 

* may now resolve civil actions of real property

- with an assessed value not exceeding P400,000,

- from the current P50,000 maximum.

 

* These courts will also be assigned exclusive jurisdiction

- over civil actions and probate proceedings, testate and intestate,

- including the grant of provisional remedies in proper cases,

- where the demand does not exceed P2 million.

 

* They will also have exclusive jurisdiction

- in admiralty and maritime actions

- where the demand or claim does not exceed P2 million.

 

* First level courts include

- Metropolitan Trial Courts (MeTC),

- Municipal Trial Courts in Cities (MTCC);

- Municipal Trial Courts and

- Municipal Circuit Trial Courts.

 

RTCs jurisdiction:

 

RTC's jurisdiction amount

- in all civil actions involving the title to, or possession of, real property

should exceed to P400,000,

- over P2 million for actions in admiralty and maritime jurisdiction,

- and also over P2 million for all matters of probate, both testate and intestate.

 

- shall also have jurisdictional supervision over:

- “all cases in which:

* the demand

* exclusive of interest,

* damages of whatever kinds,

* attorney’s fees,

* litigation expenses and

* costs or the value of the property in controversy

- exceeds P2 million.”

 

Delegation to the SC:

 

RA 11567 - delegates to the Supreme Court (SC)

- the power to further increase or decrease the jurisdictional threshold

- of the first and second level courts

- in line with the SC’s power of administrative supervision over all courts

#law #remediallaw #RA11567

Forgiveness by Denise Miller

 FORGIVENESS 

© 2007 Denise Miller www.swansong.ca

We forgive others, not for them, but for ourselves. Even if the wrong is never acknowledged or atoned for, we may want to feel our way back to a caring place. It’s the place we’d rather live in.

The wrongs of parents are among the most difficult to forgive. We expect the world of them and don’t want to lower our expectations. Decade after decade we hold the hope, often unconscious, that they will finally do right by us. We want them to own up to all their misdeeds, to apologize, to beg us for forgiveness. We want them to give us the love we’ve always craved.  We want them to embrace us, tell us they know we were good children, to undo the favouritism or criticism, to give us their praise.

This is a very natural want. No one is perfectly mature. We may hunger for our parents to repair whatever damage they have done long after we are adults. We get into trouble though, when we let this hunger rule our lives.  We become the forever-child, the forever-victim, the one who is forever Searching for a love that is impossible to find.

We want them to do what is necessary to deserve our forgiveness; we can’t let them have the satisfaction of our simply forgiving them. In many cases, even after they have died. As a result we may live forever in an immature place around this issue. We may forever live with and accept the horrible

opinions of ourselves that were formed and fostered by them. If we hold a grudge we are hanging on, not only to our parent, but most negatively, to the bad part of the parent.

In some ways it’s as if we have put our lives on hold. We will not live our lives completely until we have resolved this issue and feel the security of unconditional love. We stay locked into the badness and never grow up. We stay there waiting as that forever-child. Forever-Children don’t have satisfying jobs or real relationships. We will unconsciously stay in this forever-child place, waiting for our parents to rescue us. And they never will.

We can stay there in Neverland until we die blaming them for ruining our lives. Or we can finally step into a forgiving place and step into our lives. When we stay locked into that waiting game with our parents we do not allow reality to bother us. There may be a wonderful relationship or a very

fulfilling job in our lives right now. These loving parts of our lives could heal us, but we can’t allow those to be true. If they were then we would see that our parents aren’t to blame anymore and we’d let them off the hook. So these jobs and relationships will always not quite be what we are hoping for. They will not quite measure up. This must be true if we base our lives on blaming our parents for ruining them. We are like a small child who loses our mother in a big store. Nothing will soothe us until she comes for

us. We don’t want our partner’s love. Only our mother’s will do.

Before we can locate our forgiving self we have to process this old hurt and anger. Some believe that it’s better to leave that alone, to not dredge up the past. You have a functioning relationship with your parent now, why mess with that? This unfelt anger is keeping you from feeling any real warmth.

Forgiving our parents is a core task of adulthood and one of the most crucial kinds of forgiveness because is reverberates through our psychic lives. We see our parents in our mates, our bosses and our children. If we feel rejected by our parents we will inevitably feel rejected by these important others as well.   We have all had these feelings of being overly sensitive or having our buttons pushed. Our lover doesn’t call back soon enough and we begin to feel unwanted, cast aside, unattractive or depressed and then out for vengeance. Our child is pouty, angry, unwilling to make up with us. We cease to see him as a child and he turns into our tormentor, our rejecter, making our lives into a misery. This is a part of what is at stake if we don’t let our parents off the hook. 

We re-create with the people we love, our worst experiences with our parents.  Most parents love their children, even those that beat them or molest them.  But no parent is perfect and so we all have our childhood wounds. Some of us are aware of this and allow that knowledge to bring this awareness to

the place of hurt that dwells within us all.

Some of our parent’s bad sides were so bad though that it is impossible to hold onto the good. When we hold onto this rage, this chronic hatred inevitably this means that the worst aspects of that parent live on in our heads. That’s when we hold on to those feelings of being unloved, unlovable, and unloving.

Forgiveness does not mean that you accept or condone what your parents did to you as right. It does not mean that you deny their selfishness, their rejection, their meanness, their brutality, or any of their other limitations or character flaws.

To forgive them does two important things for you.

First - You separate from them. Stop seeing ourselves as children who depend on them for our emotional well being. Stop being their victims and recognize that we are adults with some capacity to shape our own lives and the responsibility to do so.

Second - You let them back in your heart. We can then begin to recognize some of the circumstances and limitations they laboured under and recognize the goodness in them that our pain has pushed aside. We can feel some compassion for them; not only for the hard journey they had, but also for the pain we caused them. Sometimes when we become parents we gain insight into how hard it is to get the job done right. Sometimes we see that our judgements have been horribly unfair. We may see that we’ve made one parent the scapegoat and the other one the god, or been unjust in some other way.

We can achieve forgiveness by taking a vital inner journey to deal with our hurts. On this journey we allow ourselves to feel the longings that have been pushed aside and made unconscious. To feel the part of us that is still a child, desperately in love and horribly hurt and hoping against hope that the parent will be good again and make everything right. When we can feel these childhood longings, understand them, talk about them, cry perhaps, a subtle change takes place within us. We are able to care about our own

hurt. Not in a self-pitying way, but the secure adult part of us can soothe and embrace this child.

This is the beginning of a process that can lead us out of bitterness and into a place of releasing the bad part of our parents and recognizing the good part that we may have forgotten. This can pave the way to

forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a gift to ourselves because it brings us back to the good parts of a relationship. Here we can experience ourselves as loving and lovable people. This strengthens our sense of self, as selves separate from our parents, because like it or not we will always be identified with them.

This journey to forgiveness can be a long and complicated one. We have to be ready to forgive. We have to want to forgive. The deeper the wound, the more difficult the process is. That is why forgiving our parent is especially hard. Along the way we may have to express our protest, we may have to be angry and resentful; we may even have to punish our parents by holding a grudge. But when we get there the forgiveness we achieve will be forgiveness worth having.

Feeding The Soul by Steven Kessler

 

Feeding the Soul

by Steven Kessler

"As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live." 

                                                                                   --- Goethe

Imagine you're eating an apple. You feel the crunch against your teeth. You taste the juiciness, the sweetness and the tartness, the texture as you chew. 

Then you swallow and it goes down into your stomach. Your body starts to break it down. All those digestive acids start to separate it into the parts you can use and the parts you can't use. The sugars go to the muscles; the calcium goes to the bones; the potassium goes to the nerves. The bones get stronger, the nerves work better, and the muscles have more strength and aliveness for movement. 

And then tomorrow, you're done with it. Your body has separated out what's nutritious from what's not. You go to the bathroom and you let go of what's not useful, what's not you anymore. And you have the use of the good parts for living. If you're a child and you're still growing, you grow. If there are parts of your body that are hurt, they heal. And this process goes on without you having to think about it. Pretty neat, huh?

But what does this have to do with feeding the soul? Well, there are some parallels we can draw between how the body eats and how the soul eats.

We know what the body eats: it eats apples and fish and pizzas and all sorts of things. What does the soul eat? It eats experience.

How does it eat experience? Let's go back to the example of eating the apple. Imagine biting into it. There is the experience of the sweetness, the experience of the tartness, the experience of the crunch and the texture. There is something in those experiences that the soul can use. But, like the body, it can't use those things in raw form. It has to put them through a digestive process to extract the nourishment.

Now before we continue the analogy, let's take a moment to talk about what we mean here by 'soul'. We mean the part of you that is aware, that experiences. We mean the experiencer, something that is not static, that is not the same when you die as it was when you were born. We mean something active and dynamic. Something that is curious and intelligent and juicy by its very nature. Something that grows and develops, something that learns by experiencing and digesting its experiences.

So how does this digestion process work? Well, just like with eating food, the first step in the process is to take the experience in and hold it. We hold our food in our stomach. How do we hold experience? We hold experience just by being there with it, just by our simple awareness of it. But we get in the way of this step when we push our experience away, when we say "No, that's not okay for me to experience. I don't think like that." Suppose you're feeling angry with someone, but you have a belief that says, "I'm not allowed to feel angry at people," so you deny that experience and push it away, out of awareness. As long as you keep it out of your awareness, that experience will not get digested, and you will not learn anything from it.

This is one of the problems with being judgmental. It serves to push away the experience that you're really having, which keeps you from digesting it and learning from it. And that's why self-acceptance is so necessary to personal growth. The first thing we have to do is to actually let the experience in. If you don't take the piece of apple into your mouth and chew it and swallow it, you won't get any food value out of it. And it's the same with experience: if you don't take the experience in, your soul won't get any value out of it.

Now, sometimes an experience is really overwhelming and we have to keep it out for a while. There can be good reasons for doing this. Maybe you remember something that happened to you that was so overwhelming you just forgot about it for a while. Or maybe you distracted yourself so you didn't have to pay too much attention to it. When an experience is overwhelming, we have to push it away in order regulate the amount of charge in our nervous system. When our system is dis-regulated, we can’t digest experience, anyway, so bringing ourselves back into balance has to be our first priority. But eventually we have to come back to the experience and digest it. 

With food, if you eat something that isn't good for you, your body can get rid of it. There are a couple of options. You can throw up. Or you can get diarrhea – your body can flush it through. Or if you eat something that is toxic or poisonous to you, your body can coat it with mucous and pass it through without touching it – not even try to digest it, but just encapsulate it until it can be excreted.

So the body has these options – but the soul doesn't. When you’ve heard the bell ring, you can’t un-hear it. When we have an experience, we can’t un-have it; eventually we have to digest it. We can encapsulate it – that’s what repression is all about – but we can't excrete it. Sooner or later, since it's stuck in our bodies and is clamoring for attention, we have to attend to it. Have you noticed that we all have patterns in our lives, patterns that take us back to the childhood scenes where we were hurt? That is the action of those old buried hurts, saying "Hey! Pay some attention to me." There is something in us that knows we need to go back and digest those old buried experiences, both to get the learning from them and to clear them out of our bodies. And once we can do that, our behavior changes. The troublesome patterns diminish, and we feel lighter, clearer, stronger, and safer.

So sooner or later, we have to digest the experiences that we've had. But we have the option to do it when we're ready and with the support we need to be able to digest it. You can have people with you to help you accept and hold the stuff that was too much to hold before. You can give yourself the stillness and time to do it. That's what meditation is for, what psychotherapy is for, what support groups are for. Even talking with a friend about what's going inside you does this. So, the first step in digesting an experience is just to hold the experience in your awareness. 

The next step is to put your attention on “what do you feel?” Without censoring anything out, without letting the list of shoulds control what's going on in you, what do you actually find happening inside yourself? And not just your thoughts about it, but the raw sense perceptions in your body. 

It can be pretty unnerving sometimes. There was one time in meditation that I found myself experiencing a kind of veneer or plastic coating over everything in the world. I could almost touch it. After sitting with it and opening to it enough, I discovered that the coating was hatred, my hatred for everything in the world. There was a part of me that was hating the whole world. Now, that's not such a complimentary thing to discover about yourself. But it was amazing. For some reason, I had come to a place in my inner work where I was ready to let myself become aware of and digest that part of my overall experience. I'm sure it had been going on for years, but I had not been able to notice it. There was something about staying with that experience and actually opening to feel the qualities of that veneer – the plastic, waterproof, impenetrable film that wouldn't let anything through it – that allowed me to learn what I needed to learn from that experience.

So I'm suggesting it is valuable to just let the digestive process happen by giving yourself time, permission, support, and letting the perceptions deepen and move through. Talking about it helps, writing about it, drawing it, painting it, dancing it, singing it – expressing it in any way – because when you put it into some outer form, when you put it into a poem or a story or a drawing, your soul can both feel it and put it outside of you, out in front of you where you can look at it and see how all the pieces fit together.

There is a sorting process that is at the very root of the process, whether we're digesting food or digesting experience. When you eat food, the body has to divide it up into the useful parts and the not-useful parts, the nourishment and the waste. Well, the soul has to do the same thing when it digests experience. So what part of our experience is nourishing? Truth is what's nourishing. It is truth that feeds the soul. That's why we value it. The thing that we really crave is to know the truth, to know the reality of the situation. And that's why we're willing to go through all this difficulty to find out what really happened in a given situation. 

And what happens after you get this sorted out? Understanding, clarity, release of tension. There's a little relaxation that happens in the belly. There's a kind of clarity that comes into the mind. And suddenly things seem easier. 

There was an issue that I worked on for many years, first completely unconsciously and then more consciously, and that was, “Why did my Dad treat me the way he did? Why didn't he love me?” 

When I was young, it didn't occur to me that the fact that he was drinking six martinis every night was part if it. I thought everybody did that. I didn't know it was different. Later, when I was in graduate school in psychology, I attended a class on alcoholic families, and as the instructor listed the characteristics of the alcoholic family, I had to hold onto my chair because things were jumping around so much inside me. I was realizing, "My God, my family does all those things." I felt awful, but suddenly things made more sense. Some of my early experience was now digestable for my soul. 

And then, years later, after doing more inner work, more therapy, more meditation, I came back from my annual Christmas visit with my parents, and when I went to see my therapist, I said, "You know, it wasn't that he didn't love me, he just didn't love anybody. He doesn't know how." The whole picture had shifted, and my soul, my psyche, was now able to separate out a new layer of what was true from what wasn't true. 

I had tried for years to get through this issue. I had tried being angry with my Dad, I had tried coercing him, I had tried pretty much every method I could think of. I had also tried forgiving him, but that didn't work because there was a piece of it that I still needed to understand. I think forgiveness is a great thing, but it’s the end of the process, not the beginning or the middle. If you try to forgive somebody before you understand what happened, I suggest you're cheating yourself. You don't have to be mean to them, but notice your actual inner experience regarding them. If there is still resentment, maybe there is something that still needs to be digested. 

Notice that there are steps in this process. After you eat a meal, your body needs time to digest it. And similarly, your soul needs time to digest your experience. And then there's a time for activity, for metabolizing what you have taken in, for living from it. And finally there is a time for letting go of the waste. 

Fortunately, when digesting food, the body sorts out the waste for us. We go to the bathroom and the body knows exactly what part to let go of – we don’t have to think about it. With experience, what is the waste, the part we need to let go of? It’s what's false, what's not true. 

However, sometimes that false stuff can be very attractive. For instance, you may like thinking "I am the brightest guy here." But if it’s not true, the world will not reflect it back to you. When you're holding on to something false, the world appears to act in weird ways. It fails to reflect your beliefs. It does not confirm your self-image. Reality rubs up against your inflations and distortions and dismantles them. This may be uncomfortable, but if you can allow the process to run its course, you will find that the truth is more nourishing than the fantasy, no matter how attractive it was. 

So, how do you know when you're done digesting something? How do you know that the cycle is complete? With food, you know because your belly is empty; you're hungry again and ready for more. What is it that happens with experience? With experience, you are done with it when there is no longer a charge around it. What told me that I was finally done with my stuff around my Dad was that I was no longer invested in trying to get him to be different. I no longer was trying to coerce or persuade him into giving up drinking, or into coming back and being the father I had wanted. I still wished he would, but I had made peace with the fact that he probably never would. I felt sad about it, but I didn't have to push away the sadness by trying to change him or myself.

So this is my best answer to questions about how to feed the soul and what the soul needs. It needs truth. It needs the nourishment that the truth provides and the doorway that the truth opens into clarity, understanding, and compassion. 

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