Pair #73 Death reminds you to think about who you need to call

Hey, what's happened to curiosity?  Did it do something wrong? Did it get relegated to the third division?  When did we decide that all things have answers and that life is a search for definitive solutions and no questions should be left undone?

We turned life into the multiple answer quiz and removed the option "None of the Above".

But I was thinking this week and I wrote down on my pad next to me:

What if all life were the adventure of finding out, rather than finding?

Maybe it is the nature of the human mind that has become so petrified by the discomfort of not-knowing that it will settle for a poor answer or half-truth before it admits it does not know.

Or has it just become not cool to not know?

I thought there used to be joy in the process of discovery.  Didn't we like a bit of mystery? The word 'wonder'  ponders and considers.  It's open.  It shrugs its' shoulders a bit. It has patience.  And Christmas used to be a holiday of 'wonder', right?  We have 7 Wonders in this World.

Actually, only 7?

That's not a lot of Wonder.

To be unsure is to be invisible.  The humiliation of the admitting you have no answer is actually worse than hoofing something indefensible or silly. Ever seen someone defend a totally made-up fact because they got cornered by their own uncertainty? 

"Actually, dear, no, I'm not sure which road to take or where we are."

Will you hear that?
 
Well, we can all recognize ourselves here. I certainly see myself. 

Having said that, I can't tell you the weight that lifts when I say, "I'm not sure."

Try it on.

What do you think?

 "I don't know.  But I wonder..."

For me, one of the great values of putting something into the same brain compartment where you store: "pick the kids up from school" and "catch plane home" - is that when you've really committed to something, you find out if you really want it or not.

What a relief.

Everything that follows the moment of commitment is information to you about how much you really want something or how much you don't.  Sometimes, it's the first time you actually realize you really just don't want this thing - and can stop fooling yourself (or trying to please others or not let them down) and just get on with your own life the way you want to live it.    

We can waste a lot of time trying to 'should' ourselves into things we never wanted in the first place (like those college majors we dithered over).  Commitment is the great sorting hat!!   

(May you not end up in 'Slytherin')

We all celebrate achievements and successes, but sometimes I wonder if our occasional champagne-fueled trophy ceremonies, while celebrating the lone winner, aren't attended by a crowd of self-punishing people who mainly feel bad it's not them. 

I mean underneath, we all are aware of having set high sites on a goal and then failed. Maybe miserably and humiliatingly.   And then we turned that failure into the lifelong drive to never feel that sting again.  We set a course toward destination Avoid Failure At All Costs, and whenever we do that we pay a high price.   From where I'm standing I think two things happen
 
we lie to ourselves  and we try to be something we can never be: a perfect human. 

We lie to ourselves because we tell ourselves being perfect is possible, which it is not.  We tell ourselves striving for perfect works to create perfection. Which it does not.

Then we abandon ourselves.  We walk right out of our own bodies when we think that it's possible to be anything other than who we are.   

To achieve something feels good.  I made a promise to myself that every month I'd keep my accounts  up to date and every time I do that and keep my commitment, that feels good. Nothing wrong with that.  And I notice that doing what I say, and living up to what I believe doesn't require me to be perfect.  Just to live and be myself.  Maybe living as myself actually requires that I mess up - otherwise how can I even know my own preferences. 

We don't need to make what we are perfect, that is just another form of self-punishment. You can't self-punish yourself into loving yourself.  Might as well let it out - warts and all.

This week...consider rewarding yourself for doing a terrible job.   

You might notice that you are still yourself -  perfectly acceptable You.

Pair #68 A dollop of helplessness to go with that...?

One of the weirdest things to comprehend as I've become a student of the mind and how it works - is how we create our world through our thinking.

But what is it to 'create'?

The popcorn version of this idea says that you "get what you think about" - which interpreted literally means: parking spaces, Porsches and bicycles appear just because we think about them enough.  Now if you can do that, great.  That makes me very happy.  Really.  I mean, life is all about what is true for you and what you know from your experience.

But if you've tried to think and make it so and that did not work - here's a clue.  Change the words 'get what you think about' to 'experience what you think about'

We experience everything in the world through our thinking about it. I don't experience you, I hear, see and experience my thoughts about you.

And if you think about that, it makes sense. In fact, it's incredibly simple and boils down to:

It's hard to have a good moment if you are having shitty thoughts.

The implications are just a simple, and just as far reaching. If you are in the middle of something and you want to experience something different, you will have to change your thinking about it.  

Of course, you can also walk away, you say.

Well, quite right.  And you can walk away and continue right on thinking about it too.  For as long as you like. Even for a lifetime, if you so chose.

The simple maxim 'you get what you think about' = you are experiencing life through your thoughts about life.  If you are aware of that, then you have choice.

The definition of powerless is not realizing or exercising that choice.

Pair #67 Anyone seen my happiness lying around?

Recently I attended Robert Holden's Coaching Happiness training and I really experienced the power of asking yourself deep questions about happiness ... and then listening for the answer.

What Robert brought home to me was the power of asking questions like, "What is Happiness for me?"  and treating Happiness, not as a destination, but as an inquiry.  

Here are some of my fave quotes from Robert that week

"When we forget who we are, we forget what happiness is"

"Happiness is a non-deserving issue"

"Happiness is the experience of your true nature"

"Will your choices help you be happy Now... or Eventually?"

Where am I with my inquiry?  For me, today, happiness is relaxing into me exactly as I am and exactly as I am not.   Self-love and self-acceptance may sound pretty dumb when rolled up into pat utterances like "love yourself" or "I'm OK, You're OK" but when you ask what that looks like and what it means for you, it can become meaningful. 

What is happiness?

when I stop trying to 'become'
when I'm kind and loving
when I'm not believing all my small thoughts about myself
the space when I'm not trying to rid myself of anything

Happiness is when I look and really see that I'm always just one thought away from happiness. 

How encouraging.

You know those moments when you 'space out' for a bit?  It just lasts a few seconds.  Imagine if that were your whole life!  I  have this horrible thought that I might wake up one day  and realize I didn't have I life, just  a lot of Coach bags. A life who's motto would be "I came, I slept, I shopped."

One of the reasons many people come to me for coaching is simply the horrifying idea that they might wake up one day, like Sam Walton (Founder of Walmart) and share his last words... "I blew it."

The way I chose to deal with this whole idea was to decide that my life would be about coming awake and sharing that possibility with others.

One of the books that really fed my longing for more awareness and conscious action in my own life is Anthony de Mello's "Awareness." Please put this book on your 'read before I die' list.  De Mello was a Jesuit priest, a delightful, spiritual - and very frank - man who cared about all of us knowing that it was possible to live life awake.   He begins the book, which is a transcript of his lectures "Wake Up To Life" at Fordham University by saying we "are born asleep, we marry in our sleep and we die asleep."  Not a new idea. One that many other teachers would agree with, from Don Miguel Ruiz to Jesus.  The really horrifying this about this idea for me is that we can be asleep, but not even know it.  Like in the film, The Matrix.

Watched The Matrix lately?  It's interesting that first line.

Wake up, Neo...

Awareness for me is a commitment.  I wanted to live 'awake' (I use that carefully, since it doesn't help me to think of an aware state as 'good' and other states as 'bad')  so I could get off the merry-go-round of old mistakes! 

It's been a tough road, an amazing road, a neverending road and the most fruitful decision I have ever made.  I talk more about it on the show which you can listen to

My radio show on Awareness from December 23rd
It includes Anthony de Mello's 4 ways of taking action to come into greater awareness that you can try out for yourself.

So, to finish, here is the man himself...

What is your preferred stress relief: alcohol? medication? exercise? therapy? or all of the above.  I bet we have all pretty much tried them all.  Maybe not simultaneously - or at least not as far as I remember.

Ultimately we do them all, alone or in combination, but interestingly they don't actually work.  I'm coming to believe that is because stress doesn't actually exist.  It's not a thing.  Stress can't be thrust upon you and no one can give it to you.   Even what other people do can't make you stressed.

That is not to say that if you take a drug meant to reduce anxiety, it doesn't work.  It does.  I've seen it.  Drugs that remove anxiety work well and help you feel like everything is fine.  That doesn't make everything fine.  It just makes you less aware.  That could be good.  And that might not be so good in some cases.

To feel stress or anxiety,  you need to be narrating the events you are seeing (I suggest you test this out and see if it's true - it is for me). You have to be telling yourself something.  And generally it sounds like this:

This should not be happening to me.  (But it is)
They need to stop this right now. (But they don't)
I used to be able to do these things. (But right now I can't)
I should definitely have this handled by now. (Why don't I?)

One example of this is someone said to me the other day "I can't stand this  anymore."  But the reality was that in fact, there they were, standing in front of me 'standing it'.  They weren't happy about it, and it wasn't fun, there was a lot of physical discomfort,  but in reality, they were standing it perfectly.

I am not saying pain doesn't exist.  It does.  I'm just saying we have trained ourselves to narrate our own lives and maybe we'll never stop,  but we can stop ignoring the fact we are doing it.  

Now, I just want to confess, if I'm in terrible pain, I might very well take a pill. I might need enough relief to think more clearly.  I do what I can do and I'm not a doctor, healer, nor a spiritual practitioner who does prayer treatments.  It's just very nice to know that whatever happens, it's possible to manage my own stressful thinking without a cocktail.

If I so chose.

Standing outside and looking in on the lives of our friends and family makes it so very easy to see what is wrong with them!  We can see exactly where they are 'messing up', we can see what they need to fix, and we have the answers for what they should do next...

or do we?

Recently I got very convinced I had someone else's answers.  It was a sobering moment.

I had to ask myself, how can I know for certain this person should exercise, lose weight, rest, relax, meditate, read or do anything else?  How can I possibly know that?

It all seemed so reasonable.  I was convinced I was right.  Dare I say, righteously so.

Then I stepped back to realize that my good advice has no basis whatsoever - no matter how sensible it sounds.

I had to admit that what I was really saying was "I know better than you.  You should relinquish your free will and use mine."  That's ludicrous.  No, it's more than that, it's actually damaging to the other person.

Even if they manage to diet, relax, lose weight or whatever - what have I actually taught them?  I've only demonstrated that they can't trust their own good sense and that their opinion doesn't count for much (not to mention that my opinion of them is low - since I don't consider them capable of making their own decision but rather only capable of following mine).  I've also encouraged them to relinquish the one thing worth having: their own power of choice and the ability to experience the consequences of their own actions.  Without that, how can you know you are the actually the only one responsible for how your life turns out?  (After all, this is where the good news begins!)

How could what I know about your life ever be complete enough to be the basis for sound advice?  How do I know that your imminent heart attack won't be the final straw that reunites you with your estranged children?  Or finally helps you draw the line in the sand under a life of substance abuse?  How do I know what is best for you ever?

I simply can't know. That is the plain, ego-deflating truth. 

And so my so-called good advice may well be something you can do without.