So Much Happier Blog
Go Ahead, Indulge
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”
Where I live, this is a week dominated by a holiday with gratitude at its core. It has been declared a time in which we should slow down and focus on what is good. That mostly takes the form of gathering with friends and family and preparing an elaborate (hopefully delicious) meal. This makes sense; some of the most basic and important things humans can celebrate are love and good food available in plenty. However, mixing the challenges of huge numbers of people all moving around at once, gatherings of hungry people who may not always get along, and the cooking of many dishes, with tricky timing issues all to be ready all at the same moment, can make for some pretty tense times! It may not be easy to navigate such treacherous waters with grace. How to keep your cool when you’re in the crossfire of such dynamics? Here are a few things that I think might be helpful to keep in mind in order to get the most out of this Thanksgiving holiday. If you don’t celebrate it where you are, you can still probably relate to the challenges and potential of such gatherings.
Let’s start with this: So much of what we experience is the result of what we choose to focus on. It’s a lot harder to choose your focus when you’re already annoyed and in a reactive place, so start thinking now about the underlying purpose of the holiday. If you can direct your awareness to the things in your life that really are good right now, and choose to really indulge, go all out, in appreciating them, you can get a running start into the spirit of the day. When you have that momentum going, you may find that it’s easier to stay focused on what’s going right rather than getting hot under the collar as soon as your most predictable relative starts up their most trying behaviors right on cue.
You get to decide which things in your life are worthy of gratitude. No one else has the right to make these decisions for you. When people you don’t see often declare their overly frank opinions about your life in front of others, that can seem like an assault on your value as a human being. It can also bring up subjects you’d rather not talk about in front of an entire roomful of eager beavers whose opinions you weren’t seeking. If you have reminded yourself in advance which things in your life you genuinely feel good about, you can carry those good feelings with you to buoy any disappointment you feel at being asked about areas you’re not so excited about. You also know some subjects you can steer conversation toward that will help you feel more comfortable. These subjects may also help others to feel that you are doing well, and they don’t need to worry about you. When relatives seem to be giving you grief about how you live your life, sometimes it’s because they legitimately care about you and just aren’t doing a good job of expressing that in a way that seems supportive. On the other hand, the really may be trying to put you down in order to make themselves feel superior, or in order to try to guilt you into something or other. In that case, you are still in control of what you choose to think about yourself and your value. It’s good to open to constructive criticism, but criticism that comes from anything but a loving and positive place can be safely thrown out. You can always ask someone you respect and admire for her opinion later if you feel confused about someone’s message and motives. But be determined to hold onto your gratitude, and it will be easier to remain grounded in your sense of self, complete with your remembrance of all the sources of joy in your life.
If conversation lags, or if Negative Nell just won’t stop with the horror stories, feel free to ask him about what he’s most grateful for, and then do your best to join him in appreciating and celebrating those things. This can bring out some surprising and sometimes touching stories about the past that you didn’t know about your family members. I find that hearing the stories of the best things that have happened to people I know, as well as how they avoided disasters or managed them to the best of their abilities, is fascinating. It helps me to understand them better, and also to feel the ways in which I am part of something bigger than myself, because I have shared life with them.
Make an effort to meet others with a predisposition to find something to appreciate about them, even if it’s small and simple. For example, maybe they’re wearing a nice color, or clearly made a significant effort to make a tasty dish to contribute to the day. Often people go through life feeling that they’re not appreciated, and when you acknowledgment them in some way, they brighten. Most people also enjoy talking about themselves, so a compliment may lead to a pleasant conversation, or at least a tolerable conversation, even with someone with whom you don’t seem to have a lot in common. Letting someone elaborate on something that makes them feel good about themselves can get things spinning in the right direction so that everyone can have a good time.
When all else fails, cling to others with a sense of humor (as long as they’re not excessively mean spirited). In life and in family dynamics, some things are absurd. Sometimes you are. It helps to laugh at yourself and at the absurd moments you encounter. Having a buddy with whom at least you can laugh, even if a gathering is uncomfortable, can be a relief and help you to keep everything in perspective, not to mention to remember it more fondly when all is said and done.
Sometimes it’s also appropriate to cry. The most intense experiences often occur around or in connection with family members, so give yourself a break when everything seems difficult. This intensity is part of life. Around those closest to you, you also tend to learn the most, specifically because of the element of challenge—the ways in which you have to expand your viewpoint to comprehend someone else’s, or the ways in which you become more compassionate to others with certain problems because you grew to understand how those problems come into being.
A heart filled with gratitude is one that has more to give: More compassion, more understanding, more appreciation of others. If you take responsibility for maintaining your gratitude in the most positive manner that you can muster, it becomes easier over time to both enjoy what you can in any situation and to stay true to your values even in the face of conflicting viewpoints. While I’m not suggesting that remaining stubbornly inflexible no matter what should be the goal, I do think that you have a unique viewpoint and life to live that no one else can replicate. The only thing you can ultimately control is yourself: Your thinking, your focus, your behavior. It’s your job to be you. Resolve to do it well, and to make use of the best tools and ideas available to you. The world needs the best you have to offer, this week and every week.
When the World Breaks Your Heart
“There’s always failure. And there’s always disappointment. And there’s always loss. But the secret is learning from the loss, and realizing that none of those holes are vacuums.”
Tomorrow is Election Day here in the U.S., and on the following day we will know the result of the races so many have been running and working on for well over a year. The time, energy, and money spent on these campaigns amount to a massive investment, and passions are running hot about who the winners will be. Anytime we commit to a goal and pursue it with abandon, we run the risk of being sorely disappointed, and one thing that’s clear from late-breaking polls is that there will be large numbers disappointed in the aftermath of most races. These feelings will only be intensified by the convictions many hold about the dire importance of their candidates’ victories; political policy is one of the things that gets at our most strongly held worldviews about what is right and good.
This blog, then, is for everyone who will be disappointed in some way on November 9th, but also for anyone who has worked for a deeply significant goal of any sort, only to miss the mark in a heartbreaking letdown. No one can escape moments of disappointment and loss in life—this is part of what it is to be human—so how do we cope and regroup on the other side of such loss?
Before I address this question, let’s take a moment for a side trip to review some relevant principles found in many traditions of thought:
· Nothing that happens to us has only a single possible interpretation. We get to decide what the events in our lives mean. This truth gives us the opportunity to learn, grow, and become empowered by everything we experience if we so choose
· Even if you don’t believe that things happen for a reason, your choices about how to react to life events can allow all experience to serve your own and others’ highest good
· In the face of difficult, even awful, events, we can uphold what is best about humanity just because that is the kind of person we choose to be. We only have the power to govern our own actions, so that is where we can most effectively focus our efforts
· On a planet that now sustains billions of people, and more every day, we cannot avoid other people, or the natural differences of opinion that result from the interaction of billions of unique viewpoints. Cultivating compassion for others means challenging ourselves to appreciate our common humanity even when our differences irritate us
· The vast majority of people are basically after all the same things: A safe, peaceful environment and the prosperity to take care of their families so that they can enjoy long, happy lives
· People who are violent, selfish, and fearful are not happy, healthy people. (People who feel loved, safe, and secure, and who are able to receive necessary health care in the case of serious imbalance, do not behave this way.) Such people deserve our compassion and help, at the same time that everyone else deserves to be protected from their violence
· Nothing is permanent. In order to live a happy life, it helps to work on the ability to let go of rigidity about what should happen at any given moment; instead, we can strive to maintain a sense of humor, being present in the here and now, and appreciating what is good already even when our eyes are on an attractive goal
Now, on to our question. When the battering ram of a major disappointment knocks us down, we’re likely to confront a wash of emotions, including confusion, anger, sadness, and possibly jealousy or resentment, among others. Because we’re not generally taught how to process emotions, sometimes the best we know how to do is to stew in those emotions until the intensity subsides a bit and we’re better able to sweep them under the rug. They’re then hidden, but still gnaw at our faith and sense of self for as long as they remain undealt with. We then jump to mental decisions about what our experience means, and these are likely to follow what we learned by observing family members’ thinking patterns. You may do this without even noticing, thinking that the interpretation is obvious, whether that’s “The world is going to hell in a handbasket,” or “Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and corrupt and ruining everything,” or simply, “I can never get what I want.” It’s normal to experience disappointment sometimes and have difficulty reimagining life without the hoped-for results. However, if we don’t make an effort to be conscious and constructive with our thinking about what happened, we’re likely to spiral downward into the swamp of those hidden feelings every time the subject comes up again.
Feelings follow thought, so if you want to feel better about something, part of doing so is elevating your mental game. Challenging yourself to find the good that has, or might, come out of an upsetting loss can make space for awareness of new potential paths that will both honor and build on your experience. When you find yourself mentally harping on the negative aspects of the situation, mistakes you made, ways in which you feel you were victimized, work to redirect your thinking to how going through that made you stronger or deeper, and make note of the ways in which that remains difficult. You may need to talk through things with a friend, or find a book about someone who endured disappointment to become someone you admire, in order to find new ways to mentally frame your experience. Unlearning old mental habits takes time and effort, so don’t be surprised if it’s harder than it seems like it should be. There’s a lot of great work being done on positive thinking, but don’t misunderstand—this is not all we have to do to work out of disappointment. It’s not a replacement for feeling, expressing, and allowing the transformation of your emotions.
The emotional side of things is where I see a lot less work being done and made available to others, but it’s absolutely essential to our health and well being, as well as our ability to return to effectiveness in everything we do. If we don’t deal with the lingering emotional effects of disappointment, it’s all too easy to let them fester and shape our sense of identity. So here’s a process for clearing out old emotional stuff that isn’t serving you:
· As mentioned above, first you give yourself license to feel it. We’re so often taught through the words and actions of others that emotions are weak, useless impediments to be steamrolled so that we can live life on our own terms. I find this to be horribly inaccurate, and dangerous in the long term, as repressed emotions have very real effects on our health. Feeling uncomfortable emotions is not the point, but it is a necessary step in the process. Emotions have messages for you that will help you, but you have to buck common thinking and be willing to tune into them in order to receive and leverage those messages.
· Next, you need to express your emotions. I find that the most helpful way to do this is by speaking out what you feel while Tapping. Doing so helps your body to relax and let go of the stressful effects of difficult emotions until they’re far less bothersome. Expression while Tapping also helps to enable new insights and thinking that will be more helpful. It can greatly accelerate your ability to let go of those old negative thought loops that are otherwise extremely difficult to disrupt.
· Lastly, you need to reach for a willingness to allow change. Even if you’re not sure how it could come about, just the openness to finding comfort and positive transformation will allow your body and emotional system to continue to release old, stuck impediments and poor thinking patterns, particularly if you continue to use EFT throughout this part of the process.
All of this can sound pretty foreign in the beginning, but with a little practice it becomes such a relief to be able to actually admit and transform how you feel, and free up your thinking so you can make real progress. Disappointment and loss need not define how you think of yourself or what you can achieve in the future. There is actually a process you can follow that will lead you upward and onward toward better things. You can learn to work with and customize it until it works well for your unique needs. Periodic heartbreak at disappointment is something you may continue to experience throughout your life, since there will always be injustice, mistakes, accidents, and clashes. Learning to honor and eventually transform it can make you a better, more compassionate, more sane human being.
Since we started within the context of political elections, I’ll round back with a few parting thoughts for when your disappointment is a matter of a goal missed or postponed (though of course these apply beyond the political sphere as well). It’s fine to want what you want, but let’s recall that no one can know everything, or clearly see all the future effects of any event; it’s helpful to have the humility to acknowledge that your interpretation of what’s best for the world is just that—an interpretation. Of course you’re important! You’re also one of billions of people on this planet. Sometimes your ego is going to want to be able to dominate the whole world, but I’m pretty sure that’s never going to happen, so let’s maybe try to have a sense of humor about that! Even the most famous historical figures never commanded absolutely everything in creation, and there’s more competition now than ever before! On the upside, though, there’s also more cooperation than ever before, and exciting possibilities for future solutions in which you can take part. Give yourself some time to recover, address your thinking and your emotions, and you can find a new path forward to pursue whatever excites your interest next. A world of opportunity will be waiting for you when you’re ready to rejoin it.
The Parade Approaches
“I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up—they have no holidays.”
It’s November 1st, and we might as well acknowledge that the holiday season is upon us, love it or hate it! Many of the world’s most prominent religions celebrate important holidays in the course of the next two months, and while this means something different to each of us, there are commonalities. We’re likely to be busier than usual with social engagements. We may travel to be with loved ones at the most traffic-jammed times. We may be planning to host festivities, and be preparing for both fun and lots of unusual tasks and people underfoot. We may be feeling trepidation about spending time with people who we don’t really enjoy. Dreading seeing (or being!) that crazy uncle, or difficult memories from prior years. Most families, and groups of friends, experience plenty of love and fun, and also inevitable complexity. It’s a mixed bag of joy and obligation. Strap in. It’s on!
If you love it, you still need to remind yourself to take time to breathe, rest, and rejuvenate periodically throughout the coming weeks. As the calendar year draws to a close, it’s a natural time to start reflecting on what happened this year and start envisioning what we might like to work toward and experience in the new year. Don’t miss this moment, this opportunity. If there’s no contemplation at this time, you’re more likely to ring in the new year with a scattered, frantic, overstressed desire to turn back to and turn up the volume on your routine and your own personal priorities, and this can escalate into poorly chosen New Year’s resolutions; if we try to legislate ourselves into unrealistic changes, we end up disappointed and demoralized. I think it’s a much better policy to make resolutions throughout the year as needed—when we’re in a calm, centered state and we can choose sustainable plans that support our deepest desires and purpose. But if you must jump on the resolution bandwagon in January, you’ll do a much better job of it if you allowed yourself some room to breathe and reflect in November and December.
In order to really be present and drink in the enjoyment of the moments with loved ones that we’ll be given, that same allowance of breath and self-care is important. If you’re going like a speeding Mack truck for months at a time, running on too little sleep and no personal downtime, you’re more likely to resent what you give to others, and more likely to be a little irritable all throughout. If you’re not getting in a few workouts per week of whatever variety works for you, you won’t feel vital and healthy as you pile on the extra busy-ness. Instead, you’ll end up feeling slower, heavier, and you’ll likely have a harder time managing stress. If you’re not planning healthy meals among the indulgences, you’ll become nutritionally depleted to some extent, which will impact your stamina for the worse. If you’re giving no thought to your internal world, you’re likely to let your own needs go for too long before you tune in and rebalance, and it’s when we’re out of balance that we’re more vulnerable to getting hit with colds or the flu. You can’t party if you’re coughing and sneezing up a storm! To keep yourself in the game, start thinking now about how you can reserve at least some time every week for catching up on your own rest and other physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs.
If you tend not to enjoy this time of year, now’s the time to give some thought to why that is. Make sure you’re clear about the factors in play and see if you can proactively address at least some of them in a new way.
· If you tend to overschedule yourself, block out time every week that’s for your relaxation and catching up on things so you don’t have to feel so overwhelmed, and don’t compromise it!
· Build in time doing, watching, or listening to things that make you laugh. This helps in regaining perspective, plus it’s really good for you!
· If you like to give gifts but tend to procrastinate and make yourself miserable, put time on your calendar starting now so you can spread this out over time and enjoy it more.
· If there’s someone you dread seeing, enlist the help of someone else who knows how you feel, and brainstorm about how you might improve the encounter. Ask for help from someone who might be willing to run interference, for instance. Read up on ways to communicate more effectively. Don’t just tell yourself that nothing can be done! You might find ways to make everyone more comfortable so that more good times can be had by all.
· If you tend to feel down at this time of year because of unhappy memories, or the anniversary of a sad event, plan ways to honor how you feel, and again, get help if you need it. There are lots of people who have this kind of experience at this time of year; those people can understand much of what you’re going through. You don’t have to go it alone, and that’s not a healthy thing to try to do. Seek the help of a professional or find a support group or a friend who can listen when you need some caring attention.
· EFT/Tapping can be a great help in getting your true feelings up and out in a productive way, and in restoring your calm as challenges come up. If you haven’t taken the time to learn the basics, now is a great time to do it! Don’t wait until you desperately need it to get comfortable with this simple yet very powerful tool.
Perhaps you’ve noticed I’m suggesting that you work to become conscious of where the pitfalls are, and map a route around or over them rather than just allowing them to take over again this season, whatever they may be for you. Sometimes it takes time to improve your experience, but if you just keep inching forward, it can be done.
There are wonderful opportunities for enjoyment and fulfillment during this season. Take some time before things kick into high gear to look around and remember what tends to go wrong and plan for the things you’d like to go right. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan, but why not give yourself an advantage and see what happens? Time with family and friends is precious, and it deserves the same kind of care and attention we would give to any important goal or endeavor. When you turn your conscious attention on something and pursue it with clear intent, chances are you will improve it. I’ll be cheering you on! I wish you happiness in all your holiday festivities and solemnities, and I hope that the remainder of 2016 is filled with blessings for you and those you love.
A Small Light in Darkness
“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
In a previous blog, I wrote about the importance of basic meditation as a foundational tool, and the balancing effect of having a regular, deep experience of quiet and focus. Now I want to move on to one of the practical uses of this tool: Leveraging your intuition.
Now, before you decide that this is a “woo woo,” impractical concept, give me a moment to illustrate one of the ways in which your intuition can make a positive difference in your life. Every day in my coaching, as I use EFT (meridian tapping), my clients and I are often struck, and sometimes astonished, by the useful information that surfaces from unseen depths of the self. This is particularly noticeable in cases where we’re working on physical pain that we suspect or know has an emotional component. If the client has any experience at all with meditation, it’s usually not hard for her to ask a leading question of herself and wait quietly and calmly for an answer. That question might be something like, “What is the upside to having this problem, in other words, why might I be afraid to let it go?” While the client’s conscious mind might be certain that she is ready, willing and eager to move beyond the problem, given a few moments of quiet and space, some other part of the self may answer that the problem is a part of her identity, and she’s not sure who she would be without it. Other objections that surface might be that once the problem is gone, there’s no excuse for not being successful, and that might feel like a lot of pressure, or that if the client lets go of the problem and is able to succeed, others might not like her anymore. Often, when such an answer reveals itself, she will say that she truly had no idea that this objection was in there. With the new information on our side, we can make progress for her. Without her ability to find quiet, that little voice would have been impossible to hear. Usually once we start working with the new information, the pain will move, change, and lessen, sometimes permanently. This process is just remarkable to be a part of. But if the mind is always whirring like a hamster on a wheel, it will be harder to bring these natural moments of insight to the surface where we can leverage them for real, noticeable change.
Some people seem to be born with more intuitive talent than others, and some people are sure that they don’t have this capacity at all. I think it’s possible for everyone to have a valuable relationship with their intuition, but cultivating that relationship takes some time and effort—just like any relationship, whether we’re talking about one with other people, your body, mind, or spirit. Some other areas in which a relationship with your intuition can bear fruit are your ability to zero in on what you need in any given moment, or what direction will be best for you to take in the pursuit of a goal. Getting more in touch with it can also help you get a clearer “gut feeling” about someone else’s character or intentions, or whether someone you’ve just met has potential as a good friend or business associate for you. What’s difficult about opening up this capacity is that in the beginning, you have no idea whether an impression is right or not, and you’re likely to feel like you’re just making it up. Your conscious mind will try to tell you that only it is valuable, and that your efforts in this regard are ridiculous and futile. It’s only by allowing yourself to relax and wait, acknowledging but then releasing mind chatter, that you have a hope of becoming more adept at sensing something genuinely helpful.
When I’m going for an intuitive answer, I have made it a habit to stop when I feel unsure if my logical mind is making things up, clear thought away, and try again. If the impression really came from my intuition and not my mind’s machinations, it will come back in a similar way a second and even a third time, and I gain confidence that this idea might be helpful enough to run with. It’s fine to apply your mind to the question of how to use that information, and it’s a great idea to keep your wits about you as you choose how much to invest in it, especially in the beginning. This is not an exact science, and it’s always good to have a backup plan! As you keep playing with this process, you may find yourself gaining confidence in your relationship with the less conscious parts of yourself. I can tell you from experience that they have a lot to offer.
If you want to get started on opening up that intuitive box, experimenting with Tapping really is a great way to start. For instance, if there’s something you’ve been resisting tackling, you might not be sure why you keep finding reasons to procrastinate. If you start tapping and state how you’re feeling, how you just don’t want to do that thing even if your own inaction is starting to frustrate you, and then ask yourself why you don’t want to do it, you might be surprised as the clarity that results. The tapping will probably increase your ability to focus and be patient, and wait for any answer that might come up. If nothing does, well, no loss! You’ve just spent some time doing something that calms the body’s stress response and increases the likelihood that you’ll get a good night’s sleep! If you do this for just a few minutes each day, I strongly suspect that you will have an experience before too long that will prove to you that this Tapping thing really does do something. As mentioned last week, if you stay focused on your intention to improve the flow of your intuition and just keep trying without pressuring yourself too much, you increase the likelihood of success, as well as your ability to notice it when it happens.
Once you start to build some confidence in your ability to intuit information that is personal to you, you can then move on to greater orders of magnitude (for most people, at least), such as sensing information about subjects less related to you. I do find that we all have different intuitive propensities, just as some people find that they’re better at math or learning languages rather than learning about history once they start delving into those subjects in school. Some find it naturally easy to understand what someone else is feeling, while others might find that they can sometimes get a sense for who is calling on the phone without consulting caller ID. This can be a fun area to experiment in. Again, just use your common sense and tread lightly in relying too heavily on this kind of information. It’s only one aspect of the sum total of all information available to you in any given moment.
I hope you are able to see how even just this one benefit of a meditation practice can contribute measurably to your progress, even if only in very specific pursuits like using EFT. Sometimes people don’t make an effort to learn to meditate because the benefits don’t seem immediately practical, but what if your practice could lead to letting go of even some of a physical discomfort you might have? What if it could help you become more confident in the life choices you make for yourself every day? Getting started with meditation may not be the easiest thing you’ve ever done, but you can start small with just a few minutes here and there and still make overall gains. I know I’m never sorry that I’ve spent time on this because of all the ways in which it contributes to my life positively. There are many different philosophies and techniques out there. Dig around and find one that makes some sense to you and give it a try. Even if you never become more than a casual meditator, there are benefits waiting for you.
Chasing Your Tail?
“To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”
Do you ever find yourself asking, “Why does this keep happening to me?” If so, you’re in good company! You may have encountered this kind of confusion many times. We all get stuck sometimes in patterns that aren’t helpful, but also aren’t easy to solve. You may have no idea what’s going on, or you may know exactly what the problem is and feel powerless to change your outcome. Assuming that you want to start getting better results when this is your complaint, read on. We’ll look at how to break out of a persistent pattern and move toward happier developments.
When you feel stuck, you’re probably also feeling frustration, anger, sadness, pessimism or hopelessness. Since good ideas don’t usually pop up in the midst of strong negative emotions, it’s best to work on changing your emotional state before working on your issue. You might do this by venting how you feel in any number of ways (writing it all down, talking with a friend who won’t mind hearing your tale of woe, working out to let off steam, etc.), or by just getting your mind off the subject for a while. If you’re tired, hungry, or thirsty, you may need to address those physical needs too. At a time when you can feel fresh physically, mentally, and emotionally, you’re more likely to be able to take a good look at what has happened or is happening with curiosity and openness to new insights and ideas.
When you’re ready, here are the steps I recommend for moving yourself forward.
1. Start with your mind, as it helps to figure out what your level of clarity is before troubleshooting. Think through your pattern and how it tends to show up in your life. How have the circumstances played out over time? Have recent experiences been very similar to those further in the past, or are they different lately? Have you made any progress at all on the issue? Can you see any way at all in which you may be contributing to the problem? Treat this like a full-on investigation—feel free to enlist the help of a supportive friend and really get your Sherlock on. Sometimes telling someone else about all the times something similar has occurred gives you a chance to have your experience validated as unusual, which can help you feel like it’s not just all in your head. Sometimes it’s just helpful to have someone there to help as you think about your problem, and bring a different perspective to illuminate aspects you might have missed.
This is a good time to brainstorm, meaning to toss around any wild idea that comes to mind about what’s happening and why, and then try it on to see whether it seems to have any merit. Trying to exaggerate, get creative, and make things outrageous to the point of silliness (without judging yourself) brings in an element of fun, which helps you to remember this is not the only thing in your life, and it may be possible to change things for the better.
2. Hopefully, you now have some clarity about what you know. If this is a case where you know exactly what the problem is and have some ideas about how change it, but you feel a lack of confidence or an unwillingness to try your best options, skip to #3. On the other hand, if you still feel thoroughly confused, it’s now time to find an expert. You can run an online search for information about your problem and see who has experience with this, and who’s offering information about it. You can visit a library or bookstore and see what information is available there. You could find a support group for people with a similar problem, and see if anyone there has valuable insight for you. You could talk to a coach or psychologist or religious counselor, depending on the nature of your issue, and see whether that helps you to gain clarity about your options. Once you have a better idea of how others have dealt with your issue, you should have some ideas about possible steps to take.
3. If the thought of taking any of the steps that would be part of your best ideas makes you want to have a meltdown, you need to go back to physical needs (do you need hydration or nutrition, sleep, exercise, stretching, or other attention to your physical body?) You don’t have to be in perfect condition to move forward, but if any of those physical needs is very loud, you’ll do better to address it first so you’re not distracted. Once those are taken care of, it’s time to look at your emotional state.
How you feel is a powerful indicator of other factors that might hold you back if not given some air time. You can want to make progress all you want with your mind, but if some part of you is afraid to because of previous experiences or outsized worries, you’re going to have a hard time getting anywhere. We’re so often taught by well-meaning mentors that we must ignore and power through fears and other emotions, but I find that emotions are often there for good reason. They may hold important information that can help us understand how to proceed in the most efficient way for our unique needs.
This is where the use of EFT can really save the day. If emotions come up when you consider taking some reasonable step toward a solution, Tapping can help you to get clear on why you feel the way you do; it can then help you to release the fear or other emotion that is keeping you feeling stuck. I’m not suggesting that this is a one-time endeavor, because change is often difficult, demanding, and scary. Emotional management is a crucial component in maintaining motivation and effective action at all times. A persistent fear, for instance, might be difficult or impossible to completely remove from your experience, but having a tool like EFT makes it much easier to keep coming back to a calm, more resourceful state; with it, you can take useful messages from your emotions and settle them with reassurance rather than ignoring or trying to dominate them out of existence.
4. Take action on some of those good ideas you came up with in other steps. There’s no substitute for experience and the feedback it results in. Keep reminding yourself that any change requires practice; your new action may not be a comfortable tool to use at will until you’ve experimented with it numerous times. You will probably make mistakes, or find some of the shortcomings of your new policy, and you will need to start back at #1 with anything that doesn’t work for reasons you can’t quite make out.
Then, rinse and repeat. Your life is unique, and solutions that are right for you may not be such that you can copy them directly from others. It may take a lot of experimentation and refinement to find what works best for you. That’s normal and ok. Only you can decide how to best be yourself! You get to choose how to express who you want to be in every moment, and that’s a privilege. It’s one of the exciting things about being alive. The willingness to concentrate on and truly observe your own life and experience makes understanding and innovation possible. If you want a life that is more to your liking, getting there must involve focus and observation—bringing your desires into being requires that you first notice what is true for you and what you want. While not everything can be solved with the mind, it is our best tool for beginning the process of appropriate and fulfilling change. I challenge you to start paying attention to what you’re not enjoying in life, and activate the power of your curiosity.
We're Not Gonna Take It!
“Have patience. All things are difficult before they become easy.”
This week, I’ll be addressing a subject that is right up there with politics and religious debates in its ability to annoy just about everyone: The virtues of patience. Now, before you run screaming and try to pretend you didn’t even read this far, let me assure you that this blog post won’t be about trying to make you feel bad for not having any. I hope it will give you a few new angles from which to consider the concept of patience.
Let’s start by addressing the opposite, which is, I think, far more familiar to most of us leading a typical modern life. Things are hectic and we’re trying to balance so many different parts of life and self all the time. This is demanding and difficult. Here are some specific thoughts on why we tend to spend so much time in some variation of this state:
· With the advent of hyper-connectivity, we are constantly aware of hordes of other people anytime we glance at one of the many screens to which we have access. We can see what millions of other people are thinking, doing, and achieving at the click of just a few buttons. It can seem like others have a lot more of the good stuff in life than we do, at least if their own narratives are to be believed. Those who are at all competitive may feel the need to do more in order to keep up at every turn.
· The world seems a lot more crowded than it used to because of the constant crush of new information. With all the people out there doing things, it seems less likely that what we have have to contribute will be seen, acknowledged, and valued. Before the free flow of information was possible, you could be a major contributor in any market by following rules that had been in place for thousands of years in business interactions. Now the rules have changed almost overnight, and continue to evolve at a rapid pace.
· We need a great deal of flexibility and a willingness to learn constantly in order to succeed now. Until you become comfortable with always being in flux, which may take time to learn, all your discomfort might build up in ways that boil over and stop your momentum until you can regroup.
· The world population is growing at unprecedented rates. If you're paying attention, you notice that there are new and worrisome problems connected with this change for which we don't currently have solutions.
· In many places, there are more people on the roads and riding public transportation than ever before, as well as in lines at supermarkets and other necessary stopping points. It can seem like everything is more difficult and time consuming because of the crowds everywhere you turn.
So what is this mythical thing called patience? There's a cultural idea many of us have inherited that tells us patience is a virtue of the very good, and very boring. Patience is not fiery or exciting, and we're often told that people need to be a hot, brightly burning mess in order to get anything great done. We’re given examples of all the great artists who lived hard and flamed out early. Well, that might be fine if you knew what you were passionate about early in life and had the means to pursue it; on the other hand, what if you'd like to live past the age of 30 and have the option to continue learning and doing new things as you go? You’re going to have to last and be able to keep yourself moving. There will always be ample reasons to be impatient in this fast-paced world, but impatience is not a fun or creative state to be in. Because it destroys our ability to apply ourselves in a focused manner over time, mastering impatience is necessary if we want to achieve anything that requires consistent effort.
I like to think of patience as the ability to wait for glorious results and enjoy the work you need to do all along the way to achieve your goals, avoiding having a meltdown that stops your progress anytime something real or imaginary gets in your way. When I put it this way, it probably sounds pretty reasonable and necessary, right? I think the idea that being a patient person means being either deeply, impossibly good or passionless really needs to go!
Here are a few ideas for increasing your capacity for patience, broken out into the areas of self that is involved. Since most cultures today emphasize the mind, the mental solutions may seem more familiar, but they all work together and should be considered:
Mental solutions:
· Read biographies/autobiographies of people you admire. I guarantee that these will not read, "I was born, and then everything I ever wanted happened without my lifting a finger." Even if the person was born into wealth and privilege, his success was not that simple. This puts you in the good company of others who have worked for what they wanted. It also reminds you of the value of a good story, which is what you will create by staying in the game.
· Contemplate how more people on the planet also means more brain power and creativity available to solve the world’s problems and improve quality of life for everyone. Would you want to go back to a time in which there was a lot of unoccupied land, but no essential services? No dentistry? No emergency medical care? I wouldn’t. No, thanks.
· Remind yourself that reality T.V. tempts us to believe that succeeding overnight with little effort is a viable route to our goals. In fact, most of those featured in these programs have done plenty of work behind the scenes to get where they are, if only the work of promoting themselves—which still counts as work!
· Make an effort to become aware of mental nosedives when you are indulging in them. You don't have to be in a deep meditative trance to notice your own thinking. Let's say you just got your 5th book rejection, and you're frustrated. You might think something like, "This book is going nowhere. I don't know why I bother. No one cares about what I have to say. No one likes me." We all string together thoughts like this sometimes, but it's probably clear to the observer that a few publishers passing on your project has no correlation to whether or not people like you. You actually do have power over what to think about yourself and your life, but first you have to practice noticing your mental habits. Then, you can begin to change them by talking gently to yourself as you would a friend in distress. In the above example, you could say to yourself, "Wait a minute. I have plenty of people in my life who like me, and if not, I can make new friends. I bother because I like writing and know I have something to say." Time to be your own best friend! This is another essential life skill that most people never acquire, but being able to give yourself an effective pep talk can be invaluable when you’re working on challenging projects.
Physical solutions:
· In short, take care of your physical body. Ignoring these needs makes it a lot harder to be patient.
· If you're not sleeping enough, you will be irritable and reactive, and you won't be able to think clearly. There's really no way around it. Find the number of hours that works best for you by experimenting.
· You also need high-quality nutrition in order for your body to function well. Learn about nutrition yourself or get help with a basic plan.
· Regular exercise increases your energy, stamina, and strength and helps manage stress. Find something you like to do to get your body moving.
Emotional solutions:
· Anger is the enemy of patience. Most of us have huge stores of built-up anger caused by a lifetime of incidents, which we've swept under the rug because we've been taught that it's rude and unacceptable to express it. If you want to build your capacity for patience, you're going to have to deal with your anger. While there are lots of suggestions you can find for doing this, in my experience, nothing is as effective as EFT/Tapping for processing old emotions without any destructive side effects. Plus, you can do it yourself anytime, anywhere, for free.
· Other old emotions and traumas may be partly behind those previously mentioned negative thought spirals. You may find that processing old disappointments, humiliations, and other discomforts makes it a lot easier to avoid the nosedives over time, because now those memories aren’t dragging you down every time you’re challenged. Some things you can't just think yourself out of because they’re not purely mental. That’s why modalities with physical and emotional aspects are so important.
Spiritual solutions (these are best when they respect your beliefs and traditions, so you’ll need to find what works best for you):
· Ask for help. You can ask people you know or ask for help from some spiritual force, but the act of being willing to ask and being open to receiving help can be transformative on its own. Sometimes if you can relax a bit, you can find creative insights coming to you that were not available before.
· Acknowledge that you don’t know everything about how things you want could come into being. Everyone has different strengths and talents, and that’s ok. If we work with ours and let others work with theirs, and trust that it can all work out, life is more enjoyable and holds more opportunity. Embrace mystery. Allow blind faith to work in your favor.
· Spend some time every day thinking about things you’re grateful for. This is not about denying what may be wrong in your life or trying to discipline yourself about having negative feelings. It just helps you to remember that those aren’t all your life is about. It helps you look forward to enjoyment that you already have access to. Some people like to write these things down. When you’re in bed going to sleep or just after waking up can be a nice, relaxed time to appreciate what’s good in your life.
Allowing yourself to be more patient doesn’t mean you have to deny that you want things, or that there are things in your life that you don’t like. It’s healthy to learn to dial down your moments of full-on freaking out so you can smooth out your experience of life, exhaust yourself less with needless lows, and make faster progress toward your goals. Don’t be afraid to consider ways to bring more of this virtue to life. If it helps, tell yourself that this means you’re being a rebel in this stressed-out, stretched-thin world. I dare you to start making serenity trendy!
Walking the High Wire
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
With an estimated 7.4 billion people on the planet in 2016, it can seem as though there can be nothing new under the sun, and yet new discoveries are made every day. New songs are written, paintings made, books completed, gizmos prototyped, with every passing day. Humans are a busy lot! This is possible because genetically, there has never been anyone identical to you in history. We’re all intrinsically unique, and with so many moving parts, both concrete and intangible—hopes and desires, likes and dislikes, talents and challenges; physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual progress and happenings. Every day is a kaleidoscope of your interacting elements, which never cease to run through their individual cycles; yet those cycles are all timed differently, and rarely align in the same way because of the complexity of the model. To a certain extent, in trying to maintain our balance with all of our parts, we’re all trying to slog our way across a high wire bucking in a high wind.
One of the great challenges in life is that, because of our uniqueness, no one can create a formula for living that is perfect for more than one person. We can share our wins and losses with each other, and we can offer the wisdom we feel we’ve acquired, but sometimes others won’t even be able to hear the messages we’re sending let alone duplicate our successes and failures. We must all tinker with the models that have been passed down to us if our greatest possible success and happiness is what we’re after. And there’s a sort of catch-22 at play, in that we have to be in a reasonably balanced state in order to make good decisions for ourselves, but without making “good” decisions that suit our needs, it’s hard to find balance. We start by making decisions that others have told us are good, but whether they will suit our uniqueness and get us where we want to go is always the question.
When how we operate, or what we want, is sufficiently different from those around us, whether in one way or in many, we may feel particularly bewildered about what to do. Maintaining some semblance of balance is a lifelong endeavor, and there is no “done,” but it’s even harder when you’re young or when you’re striking out in new directions. Luckily, in this age of information, we have access to guidance from sources well outside our own communities, and that can be incredibly helpful in broadening our horizons. You still have to put advice into practice and try it out for yourself, and you need the patience to do this over time, as every day is different. For instance, sometimes your first attempt at something will be disastrous, but with practice you realize its merit. I once watched a fellow participant in a meditation class, a first-timer, have a full-on meltdown because she was so frightened by the prospect of confronting her internal world in silence. As soon as she tried to do it, she panicked and essentially ran screaming from the exercise. In this case, I don’t know whether she ever tried again, but I do know that many people who initially find meditation to be extremely challenging learn to love some form of it with experimentation and practice. And when I first tried EFT/Tapping, I was not even sure that I felt anything at all, but after several practice sessions, I became more and more astonished with its efficacy and usefulness. I just had to put it into practice and experiment with it for myself.
I wish I had all the answers and could make everything easier for everyone, but that’s a tall order! I’ll just have to offer some ideas here for constructing your own tool kit for navigating your own personal high wire:
· Start simply. Address your physical needs first: Eat the highest-quality food you can get your hands on, including plenty of vegetables and fruits grown with the fewest and least possible pesticides (poison to you and me); avoid refined sugars and other empty calories, in other words those foods lacking in nutrition; aim for 7+ hours of sleep per night, and try adjusting up and down to see what works best for you; get some form of exercise on a regular basis—find a way to move your body and sweat at least a little. These items form the basis of any life lived in some semblance of balance. You can’t skip them, nor can anyone who wants to remain alive in a physical body, so when you’re out of sorts, come back to these first, always.
· Ask yourself what your mental and emotional states are generally like, and spend some time noticing. Find daily practices that support healthy attitudes and emotional expression. I’ve written other blogs on these issues that you may want to check out, but in short, meditate, do affirmations about your values and your intentions, talk to supportive friends and family, write in a journal, read books about people who inspire you, use EFT or hypnosis recordings, attend meetings of like-minded others; adding a spiritual component to any of these is even better, whatever your tradition of choice might be.
· Take a look at the overall shape of your life. Are you doing work you like, are you making enough money to meet your needs, are your relationships supportive and satisfying, are there activities you look forward to experiencing when you wake up in the morning? When you answer no, think about baby steps you could take to move toward situations you’d like better. If you’re stuck, ask for help or find it in a library or online. Choose a small step to make and put your plan in motion. It’s ok if you can’t see the whole path to your destination. Just do something. Every time you make an attempt, you learn and grow.
· Do you feel a sense of purpose in life? If not, it will be hard to stay engaged in life, let alone feel inspired; look for clues in the things you loved to do as a child, in the achievements you feel best about as you think back over your life, and in the kinds of things that move you deeply in movies and books. If you suddenly had all the money in the world, and you had a year off to rest and travel and regroup, what do you think you could do all day and not get tired of? (This can take some serious imagination if you’re someone who has lived with a lot of obligations or who is chronically exhausted, but it can also be a lot of fun, and is worth trying.) You can start with a very basic idea like wanting to “help people,” “motivate others,” or “clean up messes,” and then think about your favorite skills to use to see what might be up your alley. If you love to cook, you might find that helping others could combine with that so that you envision starting a catering company that donates a percentage of meals to those in need. If you feel satisfied by cleaning up messes, and your favorite skills are in information technology, you might be able to work as a consultant to people and companies who need to get organized in the digital space. This can take effort to think through, but having a purpose that feels important and expressive of who you are is an essential component in maintaining your energy levels and your commitment to persisting in the face of difficulty, which we all face every day!
Creating and maintaining good functional balance is never going to be easy, especially in today’s fast-paced world, but if you yearn for a better life, this is unavoidable work. If you can become fascinated with the process of learning about what you need and what is key for you, that is the best solution. If you make some noticeable progress in your overall balance, your success stories will likely drive you as you continue learning and experimenting with new ideas. No one knows you as well as you know you, so trust your hunches, and try not to freak out if something you try goes badly. After all, every day is different. If you try the same thing on a different day, you might find that you get a different result. Keep reminding yourself that this is work that feeds everything you’re able to do and become, and it’s worth a great deal of effort. Over time, your ability to maintain balance will build naturally if you keep at it. Confused? Go back to basics, and as you do this repeatedly, you’ll build helpful habits that make greater flexibility and creativity possible. Celebrate your successes, learn from both success and failure, and just keep inching along that wire.
Slings and Arrows
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
It’s normal to experience disappointments in the course of your daily life. These can stop you short many times each day, if we’re talking about small disappointments such as just missing a green light, finding that your grocery store is out of one of your favorite items, or having a friend cancel an outing you had planned together. Now, while they might be jarring, most of these don’t make much of an impact on your overall picture—but larger disappointments certainly can. In fact, they can be the genesis of negative beliefs that don’t serve you at all, and that may run your behavior for decades after they’re created. An event that may have seemed insignificant to others can start you down a path of fear and limited thinking, whittling the cornucopia of possible choices you have in any given moment down to a handful of uninspiring options.
Let’s look at a few ways in which this can play out:
· Most of us have a memory of a parent, even the most excellent one, overreacting to something we did when we were relatively small. Perhaps we were playing happily and decided to add a work of art to the wall of the family home. There was a sense of excitement in the idea of making something beautiful (at least to us) and sharing that with a parent. When it came time for the big reveal, we displayed the opus proudly only to be faced with the fury of someone who now had to find a way to clean it up, and thought we should have known better. That feels like a slap in the face when our intentions are innocent and happy. An unfortunate memory like this can impress us in ways that last a lifetime. We may come away from it with beliefs such as, “I can’t do anything right,” “No one wants what I have to give,” or “My family doesn’t understand or appreciate me.” And such beliefs can corrode one’s enthusiasm, creativity, and confidence in subconscious ways that are powerful, but can remain mysterious, because you may not even remember the event as you get older.
· The first few years of school usually hold some difficult social situations. Kids start relating to each other in more complex ways, and experience the results of others learning through trial and error. Most of us experience at least a betrayal or two, fights, resentments, and competitions for attention. While everyone learns, so many disappointments and hurt feelings proceed from these social experiments. If patterns emerge, we may come away with beliefs like, “No one likes me,” “Everyone is mean and it’s not even worth trying,” or even just “I hate school.” There’s often little formal instruction at educational institutions on general communication, conflict resolution, negotiation, sharing, and other essential skills, and these beliefs can remain ingrained if we don’t figure out better ways of relating and coping on our own.
· In high school, most kids experience life with a high degree of angst in the areas of identity, social acceptance, and achievement, whether academic, athletic, or artistic. Popularity is often the coin of the realm, so everyone jostles for position both through both attempting to prove their own worth and attempting to disprove others’ worth in order to seem more important. It’s normal for kids to play with dominance tactics, including those designed to provoke or humiliate others. Less competitive, more naturally cooperative kids can have a hard time dealing with these status games, and end up feeling stung and embittered by confrontations. Most of us rack up more experiences of betrayal, embarrassment, and disappointment during these years; these memories can remain particularly painful because we’re experiencing many things for the first time. We may assume that this is how all such situations will go in the future. We don’t realize that our peers will continue to grow and mature, as well as gain experience, confidence and clarity, and so will we. A humiliation experienced at this time of heightened hormones and emotions can seem like death and destruction on a scale that adults find hard to understand. We may begin to believe that, “I’ll never get what I want,” “I’m not attractive,” or something general like “People are horrible.”
· As we enter adulthood, we understand that we are now more responsible for our own choices. We start having to sink or swim, making decisions independently about relationships and leisure time, life direction, health, diet and fitness, and financial matters, and bear the consequences. Mistakes made here can quickly color our faith in our own abilities, since we’re “supposed” to be able to handle ourselves by now, but in reality may still have many gaps in understanding of basic mechanics, and a lack of supportive habits, which must be built over time. Beliefs like, “I can’t keep up with everything I need to do,” “I’ll never be able to support myself financially,” or “I’ll never be able to get where I want to go in life” may result from early failures.
· At any time, we can experience life-changing disappointments such as the death of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, or the sudden loss of a job. Unfortunate beliefs like, “I’ll never recover,” “I’ll never find love again,” or “I’m a loser” may spring into being.
Did any of those beliefs sound familiar to you? Disappointments affect all of us, and yet there isn’t much help available for actually processing the often overwhelming emotions and the negative beliefs that result from them in everyday life. Most people either talk things through with family or friends, or see a psychological professional to gain perspective on the situation, but usually neither of these addresses the trauma we may be holding in the physical body or the emotional patterns that keep us limited. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know what I’m going to say here—techniques with a somatic (meaning involving the body) element seem to be the most helpful for supporting rapid change in these areas. In my world, there’s just nothing like EFT/Tapping for shaking limitations loose and helping us to shift our understanding of past events and their role in shaping who we are. Using it helps us to gently but effectively let go of the adverse effects of painful events that are now part of the distant past. Once you have a chance to lighten the emotional load you’ve been carrying from past disappointments, a new world of possibility opens, and that, to me, is one of the most exhilarating experiences there is.
Who's Driving This Thing?
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
I’ve noticed in my work with clients that many people are much harder on themselves than they would be on anyone else, especially people they love and care about. Something for which one would easily forgive a friend becomes unforgiveable in oneself for reasons that are hard to fathom. Sometimes the client will even say that it seems irrational for him to feel so guilty about something relatively minor, and yet he does. What gives? And why is this such a common experience?
I think the answer is that we have learned this behavior, usually from people who had no idea what was being passed down, in two different ways. First, the conscious part of the equation: When we’re children, we hear from all the adults around us, as well as from friends and peers, about what constitutes being a “good” person. We may have trouble unifying everything we’re told into a cohesive theory about how to behave, but we do know that we’re supposed to try to be “good.” We doubtless remember times when we were accused of behaving badly and intentionally embarrassed by someone, whether publicly or privately. We may learn that life tends to go more smoothly when we behave in a pleasing way toward others; we then take on the job of policing our own behavior, taking on the voices of people we respected or feared and obeying them even in their absence. This is relatively easy to recognize if you think about it—by which I mean that it may take some work to notice when you’re trying to please someone who’s not there, but if you pay attention to how you make decisions, you’ll probably start to see some of these habits before too long.
And now for the second part that is not conscious. Figuring out how this piece is affecting you can be quite a bit trickier. In The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton writes about how recent scientific study has revealed that children under the age of six spend most of their time in different brain wave states than adults. Until the age of two, children exhibit mostly delta brain waves, which in adults are associated with sleep states, and from ages two to six they spend most of their time in theta brain wave activity, which in adults is associated with the kind of “suggestible, programmable” state that hypnotherapists lead people into in order to help them accomplish change. In other words, young children are generally not in a fully conscious state that adults would recognize. They do not have access to conscious decision-making and analytical abilities. Therefore, whatever a small child hears is downloaded into her subconscious directly. Did you get that? Young children have no filter; what they hear is recorded directly into their subconscious minds as truth. When you were young, you learned a great deal that you are not aware of now, and it’s still affecting you today unless you’ve taken concrete steps to update that information.
That explains a lot about why it can be so hard to change old habits and beliefs even if we want to. The reasons why we feel a certain way may well be rooted in events and verbal commands we can’t even remember! We have years’ worth of programming that we’ve never had the opportunity to examine. We may remember plenty from childhood, and still be unaware of some pivotal beliefs that were instilled in us very early. The people who taught them to you have changed or may not be alive anymore, but the messages have not. Part of your mind is being run by ghosts.
We all know that parenting is a tough, demanding, and often exhausting job. Parents do what they can to keep us safe and healthy and stay sane at the same time. One of the methods most use is the application of shame to keep us in line—a sharp tone of voice telling us to stop it and a withering look, questions about what we were thinking when we did something that seemed really dumb or dangerous from an adult perspective, maybe a slap upside the head to let us know just how unacceptable our choice was. (Some of this is non-verbal, or even learned from things we just overheard rather than experiencing them personally.) If they can make us feel bad about certain choices, it’s less likely that we’ll make them again. While this can be effective, its continued use can also leave us with a general feeling of not being good enough/as good as others, or the feeling that we need to talk to ourselves harshly in order to avoid bad decisions and consequences. Once it’s installed, this habit of self-talk can run for decades or a lifetime without your awareness of what it’s really about, or that there are other alternatives. The only thing that really makes this second half of the equation different from the first is that it occurs before we can be fully aware of what’s happening, and we may not be able to recall it later.
Some of this may not seem very empowering. After all, what can we do about things we don’t even remember in the first place? In fact, there are ways to clean up even the mysterious things that may be holding you back. Making positive change happen in your life often requires the use of tools that can open a dialogue between your conscious and your unconscious mind. My favorite of these is EFT/Tapping because it’s highly effective, and it’s a self-help tool that almost anyone can learn and use safely. Once you’ve spent some time getting the hang of it, it’s astonishing what you can learn about yourself and what might be keeping you stuck in a particular area of your life. It takes practice to become confident in this dialogue, but it’s well worth the effort if you’re someone who would like to feel better physically, emotionally, or spiritually, or to work toward more positive mental habits. Despite what we may have been taught, it is possible to learn to treat yourself more kindly, and think and problem-solve more constructively. Quieting habitual negativity can free up a lot of energy for better physical health and greater creativity. And now that you know more about how children function, you might want to spend some time thinking about how you talk to the little ones in your life. What you say to them will shape their habits more directly than you might think. Choose your messages carefully to support their long-term health and happiness just as you learn to be more careful with how you speak to yourself.
Onward and Upward
“The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor. No matter how hard it seems, the longer you persist, the more likely your success.”
Just keep going. This is one of the most important principles I know of in the grand scheme of creating a successful life. You don’t have to always be running—you can walk, skip, hop or dance—and it’s ok to take a breather now and then when you need it. But if you can build the habit of just doing what you can to move forward a little bit every day, your progress toward what you want will be much faster than if you tend to exhaust yourself and drop out, or reconsider everything when you don’t get immediate results.
In such a fast-paced world, one in which we’ve been shown that everyone can become an “overnight” success by just getting on a reality T.V. show, our expectations may have become a bit unrealistic. For most people, success is the result of years of effort, which invariable include lots of ups and downs. Even those who seem to have gotten a big, lucky break have usually spent plenty of unglamorous time preparing and wondering at times if they’d ever get anywhere. Just like the rest of us!
I would suggest that this time of uncertainty and constant application yields precious abilities, even when it seems like nothing is happening. When we keep going despite resistance, worry, boredom, and annoyance, we’re building a habit of focus and healthy stubbornness that can serve us throughout life. Of course, I’m not implying that we should be so stubborn that we never consider our results and adjust course, or listen to the constructive feedback of others. I am in favor or each person dancing to their own drummer, though; you must ultimately be the one who decides what is right for you, and sometimes even the most well-intentioned advice must be ignored if it doesn’t seem right to you and for you. Some of the people who have invented the most astonishing things throughout history have been told over and over that creating what they saw in their mind’s eye was impossible. They kept going and perfected those things anyway. Healthy stubbornness in action!
There are many ways to keep yourself going when it’s difficult and uncomfortable to do so. I suggest broadening your tool set so that you have a better chance of staying in the game when the going gets frustrating. For example:
· Figure out what motivates you and roll with it. Are you someone whose abilities wake up when you’re moving toward something good, or working to outrun something you fear? Most of us respond somewhat to both, but you may find that one or the other is more effective for you. If you like to imagine moving toward something you want, remind yourself at least once a day what you’re working toward by imagining it vividly—preferably numerous times per day. This will bring you little surges of energy and the ability to recommit to your task every time you do it. You can also give yourself a little pep talk here and there and remind yourself of the progress you’ve made. If you get fired up when you imagine moving away from something bad, you can imagine something like that instead—see, hear, and feel people talking about how you failed and they knew you’d never amount to anything, etc. For most people, far more repetitions of the positive style of motivation is best, but throwing in a vision of what you definitely don’t want can sometimes add some spice to the mix.
· Take care of your physical needs without fail. Don’t skip meals, but keep them healthy. Get regular exercise, which builds energy and helps manage stress and lift your moods, and stretch your muscles to stay limber. Get at least seven hours of sleep per night. Brush and floss. You get the picture.
· Tell only the people you know you can trust to be supportive about your big goals. The last thing you need is a lot of negativity from people who think small, or are threatened by your unique vision.
· Commit to being a lifelong learner. No one starts off as an expert. We all build expertise in the areas we choose over time, and it never happens overnight. You don’t have to keep up with all information all the time, but you do need to keep up with your chosen field of interest, and again, it’s a fast-paced world out there. This will take some time and attention always if you want to be good at what you do, but it will also keep exposing you to the brilliance of others, which is inspiring.
· Find ways to blow off steam when you hit road blocks. Do or watch something that makes you laugh yourself silly. Spend time with friends. Volunteer for a worthy cause and get your mind off your own troubles. Spend some time on a hobby that just makes you feel good. Read biographies of successful people, who I guarantee went through hard times before they became famous and respected for their contributions. Write out your woes in a journal. Go outside and enjoy the natural world.
· Be willing to rethink your strategy as you try things and learn from your experiences. Consult others who have done something similar for advice and a change of perspective.
· If you crash and burn or fall off the wagon in some way, know that everyone experiences failure sometimes, and we often learn far more from these episodes than from we do from smooth sailing. Failures and mistakes may feel terrible when they’re happening, but they are not the end unless we decide they are. If you’re still alive, there’s still more left within you.
· Remind yourself that what you have to give is unique and important. Even if it’s not yet ready or not yet connecting with an audience or customers, someone out there needs and is waiting for what you have to offer.
For some people, succeeding to a level that feels satisfying takes far longer than they ever hoped or imagined. If this is you, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong—this is a very common human experience. We can’t always know beforehand exactly what will get us to our destination. Just keep taking a step forward every time you can, keep learning, and above all, just keep going.
Red-Letter Days
“The way to stay inspired and motivated is by doing what you like, doing what you love.”
Sometimes, you just have a naturally amazing day. You wake up feeling rested and enthusiastic, the skies are sunny and blue, you make all the green lights without driving like a maniac, people return your smiles, and you have time to get everything done. Everything seems to hum along easily. It’s so lovely when this happens. But for all the days when it doesn’t, how to stay sane? In a crowded world, we cross paths with so many others, all on their own private missions, all the time. Sometimes there are crashes, whether physical or philosophical. We have to deal with numerous institutions, from governments to schools to businesses, that bring order to our world, but which we didn’t create and may not agree with. There are important people whose happiness we’re trying to contribute to every day. And there are just so many distractions competing for our attention!
I’ve come to think of the happy phenomenon described above as the result of the alignment of numerous factors, some of which are hard or impossible to predict. While you can’t force this experience of ease into being, there are certainly things you can do to make this experience more common. If you’re serious about creating more instances of it, here are some areas to check in on:
· With what foods and liquids are you fueling your body? If your nutrition is not good, and if you’re not properly hydrated, you will start to crumble, both physically and mentally. You can’t be productive if you’re crashing throughout the day because your body is missing essential elements that it needs to function. You need high-quality protein, healthy fats, and lots of fruits and vegetables. You also need more water than you think you do.
· How much sleep are you getting, and is it deep and restful? So many important things are meant to happen when you sleep. If you’re consistently getting less than seven hours per night of high-quality sleep, you’re running on empty. You will have a much harder time with mental focus, and you’re far more likely to be emotionally volatile; your body will feel less coordinated and heavier. Some people need more than seven hours, so if you feel the need to sleep late on days off, try bumping up your sleep time routinely and see how many hours it takes per night before you stop needing that “catch up” time. In addition to sleep, we also need some rest time when we’re not running, doing, or worrying. Hobbies and creative pursuits, reading, time with friends, and other fun, relaxing activities can fall into this category. If you don’t allow yourself any of this kind of time, you’ll have a hard time enjoying your life at all.
· How much exercise are you getting? Moving your physical body both strengthens your fitness and creates happiness chemicals known as endorphins (which can enhance mood for many people just as well as the most powerful pharmaceuticals tailored for this purpose). Exercise has so many benefits for your body and your outlook that it must be considered an essential element in your daily routine. Be smart and check with your medical professional before you make any substantial changes in your health regimen, but do find an activity you can do and work it into your life. Not immediately, but with continued application, you will create more energy than you use this way.
· What gives your life meaning and purpose? Are there things that get you out of bed in the morning because you genuinely want to do them on a deep level? These can be anything really as long as you feel like you’ve chosen to give them an important place in your life and they’re important to you—learning to play an instrument whose sound you’ve always loved, caring for an aging relative, writing a book, climbing a mountain, solving a problem in your community—just something that fires you up when you think about it or makes you feel satisfied when you do it. If you don’t have anything like this drawing you forward, you’re leaving a major source of energy and joy on the table.
· What really inspires you? A particular style of music or a particular composer or recording artist? Movies with heroic themes, well-written novels, beautifully performed theatre, Olympic or other professional sports, the beauty of the natural world, your pet, etc.? When you figure out answers to this, do your best to bring these things into your experience on a regular basis. These things will also create more energy and enthusiasm for you.
· What just annoys the heck out of you? And how can you minimize the impact of these things on your life? Maybe you need to be careful not to spend too much time around the more negative people you know. Maybe you need to wear earplugs when you have to be somewhere really loud. Maybe you can brainstorm about how to spend less time commuting. You get my drift. Sometimes small adjustments can yield a lot of relief.
· What are you doing as a calming daily practice for your mind, emotions and spirit? If you want to have more days when you sail through life with joy and ease, you can’t skip this one, even though it can be hard to carve out the time for it. Find one thing or several things that can occupy this function for you, and prioritize doing one of them every day. Write in a journal, meditate, pray, use EFT/Tapping, spend a few minutes every day thinking about what you’re grateful for, walk mindfully, breathe deeply, or do something else that is calming, relaxing, and that helps you to feel centered and reassured. When you’re attending to your own needs, it’s far easier to be generous and understanding with others.
If some of these suggestions seem annoyingly familiar, as though they’ve come directly from the desk of Captain Obvious, that is most likely because these are some of the most important things we can do as humans to increase the likelihood that we will function well and happily as we go about the business of being alive, and they don’t change over time. When you’re handling these basics, you’re helping yourself to have a far better daily experience, and you’re also far more able to contribute positively to the world around you. It’s a life’s work to become a pro at balancing all this, but you’re probably already good at some of them. Pick one where you know you could do better and start trying new things, and then rinse and repeat!
Ready, Set, Groan!
“Physical fitness is not only one of the most important keys to a healthy body, it is the basis of dynamic and creative intellectual activity.”
“Number one, like yourself. Number two, you have to eat healthy. And number three, you’ve got to squeeze your buns. That’s my formula.”
There's something that I don't think people talk about nearly enough about the first two weeks to a month of starting a new exercise regime: It's going to suck.
How 'bout them apples? I bet you didn't expect me to write a statement like that! But I find that this uncomfortable early period derails a lot of people who get started on renewing fitness goals with the best of intentions, and even great feelings of commitment. We're told that exercise boosts endorphins, which produce euphoria, and can reduce stress and even clinical depression. And yet I know from personal experience as well as from the experiences of my friends and clients that those first few weeks are a challenge like no other. You'll be tired, you'll be grumpy, you'll resent the loss of time you're used to having for other things, you'll have sore muscles, and you may come up against a whole host of body-related beliefs and issues that have the potential to derail you until you've built up some momentum.
Several important things can go wrong during this period:
1. If you don't know your body really well, it's very likely that in your initial enthusiasm, you will overestimate what you can and should do to get started. You have probably taken on, on some level, the "no pain, no gain" mentality, and the belief that you need to buckle down and "just do it." You have been made to feel that your lack of fitness is the result of your being too soft and wussing out on a disciplined approach throughout your life. You think that forcing yourself to power through pain and discomfort through sheer will power is the answer, so you ignore your body's signals and plough ahead with a plan that is perhaps overambitious. You then spend days or weeks hobbling around in agony until you decide that this exercise thing is for the birds.
· In the first few weeks of activity, you are likely to have some muscle soreness or stiffness. Starting slowly helps keep this manageable, but many of us shy away from anything that feels like pain, and will start finding reasons to discontinue the effort. Epsom salt baths can be helpful here, and it’s also important to make sure you’re stretching appropriately for your chosen exercise. Keep in mind that your body will get used to moving if you stick with it. A life that includes a rewarding level of fitness need not include a lot of pain, but you may need to move through some in the beginning. Give yourself credit for being willing to go through this adjustment phase for your long-term good.
· Seriously addressing your nutritional needs is a great idea, particularly when you’re about to make greater demands on your body’s energy output and general functioning. There’s a lot of great information available out there for free from your local library and online, and I encourage you to use it to educate yourself. Sorting through it can be overwhelming, though, so don’t be afraid to consult an expert. A nutritionist can help you figure out what your body needs in order to function at high levels.
2. If you do know your body well and make (or work with a professional to make) a plan that is more realistic and sustainable/scaleable, you're still going to be dealing with the ups and downs that accompany the process for building and solidifying a new habit.
· For some of us, the problem is going to be that it's hard to stay inspired when we're at the beginning of a new road, and all we can see is a daunting upward climb ahead. The ability to keep putting one foot in front of the other when the goal seems so far away can be a huge challenge. Planning ahead by putting some support structures in place to help you get through this time is an excellent. You might want to find an exercise buddy to at least check in with on a daily basis so you know someone else is by your side having a similar experience. You could also tell a few positive people what you're doing so that they will be rooting for you, and can offer you encouragement and pep talks when you need them. It might be helpful to make sure you have something fun to look forward to every week that will help buoy your mood if things feel difficult, something that you really enjoy. In short, plan to support yourself now in any way that you know works for you. You’re taking on a worthy challenge. When you succeed in establishing a habit of healthy movement, it supports your entire life in ways that are more than the sum of the apparent parts.
· For others, the opinions of others may be a danger zone. If you have naysayers around you, you're going to have to find ways to escort the voice of their negativity out of the building, whether figuratively or literally, in order to stay focused. You may also need to do your own internal work to replace that voice with a more positive one, and to create a strong vision of the new self you're becoming to whom this new fitness habit is natural. You may find yourself asking, who will I be if I create a habit of fitness? Here you may encounter some beliefs about who you are that need to change. There are many gentle modalities that can assist you here, from journaling and affirmations to hypnosis and EFT.
· If exercise has never been fun for you, you’ll need to find ways to choose activities that you’ll will dread doing the least, and add elements that boost your enjoyment of time spent moving. Maybe working out in a group will change your dynamic for the better. Groups also offer an immediate support network that can offer encouragement and solidarity, and for many, this is a game changer. Maybe listening to upbeat music you love will really get you going, or watching a T.V. program that really engages you (only do this if you're doing activities that don't demand your focus to avoid injury, though). And make sure the program is positive—you don't want to start associating your active time with sad, frightening, or otherwise upsetting experiences, even if they're imaginative. This will likely sabotage your enthusiasm over time, which is the last thing you want. I will acknowledge that we’re all different, though, and it's important to know what works for you; for instance, I do have one friend who, along with her family, thinks that horror movies are hilarious, and they get together and laugh themselves silly watching them. For most people, that probably isn't the case, so watching horror while exercising is probably not a winning strategy for the rest of us! For some, the idea of doing something repetitive like walking or stair climbing seems way too boring. It's important to start with something gentle like walking or swimming if your current fitness level is low, but as you gain experience with exercise, you can try new things and see if there are other activities you enjoy more, or as part of a rotation of several choices that keeps things interesting for you over time.
Next week we’ll look at another, more subtle category of challenge you may need to address. For now, keep in mind that despite the difficulties inherent in starting something new, exercise is an essential ingredient in the recipe for creating a balanced, happy, healthy life. Celebrate the ways in which you’ve already built it into your life, and remember that it’s supposed to be fun to move your body. Physical activity is a pathway to a great deal of the joy of being alive. If you’re currently working on creating this habit, hang in there! I’ve been where you are, and I know that your work will pay off for you if you stick with it and remain responsive to your body’s changing needs.
Yes to Summer
“If a man insisted always on being serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun and relaxation, he would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.”
Temperatures are rising in this northern hemisphere that I call home as we near the official beginning of summer. A sun so insistently hot calls us to take things a little more slowly, hang loose a little more often, enjoy the simple pleasures of wearing bathing suits and sandals and eating outdoors. For many of us, this wakes up the awareness of our physicality and brings us further into the immediacy of the moment. We find it easier to remember to play, maybe because of the associations with summer vacations past, or maybe just because there’s so much to enjoy in this season of lazy, easy sociability. It’s harder to be in a bad mood when there’s so much sunlight and your neighbors are kicking up their heels.
All throughout the cooler, darker months we’ve been working hard and likely resting more. When nights are long, there’s a pull to go inward, hibernate and rest up in anticipation of higher-energy months. Now it’s finally time to balance work with enjoyment and celebrate what we’ve created in the dark. It may now feel more like time to share what we’ve been working on as we continue to move it forward. Sometimes it’s hard to strike the right balance here—there’s still a lot to do (isn’t there always?) and we want to get to the goal. It can be hard to allow what’s going on around us to pull us away from responsibility and discipline. But if we don’t take the time to be a part of the rites of summer, we’ll be disappointed later that we missed out on this sensual season.
If you’re the type who has trouble getting motivated, know that even those who have cracked the code on productivity need to balance out effort with social events and activities that recharge their enthusiasm for life. I’m not suggesting that you use summer as an excuse to get nothing done for months at a time, but staying in the game over time and living your passion require taking breaks. The willingness to partake of the joys on offer in every season will connect you with the life that is unfolding all around you. It helps you to participate zestfully in the passage of time rather than resist it and bemoan time’s scarcity. It helps you to share unique moments with others that you could never have predicted.
I encourage you to let in the sun during these months. You know that feeling of baking for hours on the beach, and how the sun’s rays warm you deep into your skin? How that plus the timeless rhythm of the surf drowns out some of the thoughts and concerns you might have on a routine day? Go out there and find ways to revel in some summer lounging, indulgence in a guilty pleasure of a novel, or other indolence as long as it’s relaxing. Feel free to also enjoy outdoor activities as long as there’s playfulness involved. Splurge on summer fruits that have a short season. Drink lemonade. Nap in hammocks with the sound of wind chimes tinkling in your ears. And give yourself credit for all that you do for yourself and your family and the world on all the days when you’re not indulging like this. Motivation is wonderful. Contentment is good for us too.
The Emotional Gym
“Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.”
In discussions on happiness, much is made of caring for and balancing the triumvirate of body, mind, and spirit, and rightly so. But I find it astonishing that comparatively little is said of dealing with the emotions, which are such a huge part of the experience of being human. They are the landscape of our inner world. What happens in our lives is colored by and interpreted through the lens of our emotional states; these states are dominant in determining how we feel about the overall quality of our lives, far more so than the list of happenings in our personal history.
There’s a massive amount of information available on caring for the health of the body; it will come as a surprise to no one reading this, I suspect, that generally accepted wisdom on this topic suggests that a healthy diet and exercise are important (though what these look like specifically is a matter of great contention). A tremendous amount of energy is spent the world over on educating the mind, challenging it to remember acquired knowledge and synthesize new thought, as well as on teaching it to calm and quiet through a wide variety of meditation techniques in order to unleash some of its more mysterious abilities. Every world religion has a mountain of lore behind it on fulfilling the spiritual side of human nature, and non-religious spiritual guidance also fills libraries. But where do emotions even fit into this picture?
Are they merely chemical reactions produced by the physical body? Some would say so. This school of thought tends to brush them off as meaningless byproducts of the mash-up of air breathed, food eaten, and the normal functioning of the body’s systems. In the opposite camp, Esther Hicks pioneered a concept of emotions as spiritual guidance system; according to her writings, they indicate whether you’re on track to simultaneously enjoy your life and move toward all of your deeply held desires. Others would say that emotion is a byproduct of thought, so if we want to achieve our goals, we need to learn how to manufacture supportive thoughts through discipline so that we can be efficient in life. I think that there is utility to be found in all of these viewpoints, but I suspect that this is a conversation that is far less familiar to you than the conversations around the big three of mind, body, spirit. Having done a lot of work, in recent years, that includes a strong focus on dealing with emotions constructively, I hold a conviction that this conversation needs to come out into the open. I think the rising tide of news stories depicting violent acts perpetrated by seemingly functional, but obviously massively unhappy people demonstrates the degree to which we have been ignoring this essential element in our overall health and balance.
Let’s take a look at the three viewpoints mentioned above and what they have to offer us.
- Emotions as meaningless chemical byproducts. What if they are, to quote Shakespeare out of context, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? Well, if this is true, and they have nothing of value to offer us, what should we do? This viewpoint doesn’t attempt to argue that they have no effect on us. However, it also doesn’t offer guidance in dealing with this very loud aspect of daily life. I think it’s the root of the habit of denial of our emotions that has become so trendy since the dawn of organized scientific inquiry. And the denial of something so basic to our experience of and interpretation of life seems to me to present a glaring lack of utility, and even a long-term danger to our mental health. To put the merit of this viewpoint to work, I think we need to pay attention to the chemical reactions that have been studied, such as the production of endorphins through physical activity. This is powerful, and something that almost every person can use to manufacture euphoria, not to mention physical fitness, which is a joy of its own, and a feeling of increased enthusiasm for life. For example, according to www.health.harvard.edu, a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1999 showed that when three groups of people with depression either took Zoloft or took part in an aerobic exercise program, or did both, the results of all groups were roughly the same—60–70% percent of all three groups could no longer be classified as having major depression. Regarding diet, we also have choices to make that impact our body’s ability to function mentally and emotionally as well as physically. According to an article by Drew Ramsey, MD, “One study found that adolescents with low-quality junk food diets are 79 percent more likely to suffer from depression. Another found that diets high in trans fats found in processed foods raised the risk of depression by 42 percent among adults over the course of approximately six years. And a huge study of women’s diets by the Harvard School of Public health concluded that those whose diets contained the greatest number of healthy omega-3 fats (and the lowest levels of unhealthy omega-6s) were significantly less likely to suffer from depression.” The information available about diet can be confusing, but I think it’s obvious that it has an impact on the body’s chemical state.
- Emotions as byproducts of our thoughts. If emotions are a direct result of the thoughts we think, how can we go about improving this feedback loop? Some say that when we have an uncomfortable emotion, we should learn to become aware of the thought train we’ve been on and give ourselves a chance to arrest a thought pattern that is causing us to spiral downward. There are many flavors of meditation through which we can gain insight into calming an overactive, hyper mind and practice a state that brings relaxation to the body and emotions. We can learn, through practice, to substitute a neutral mental state at this point, and even to then direct our thoughts toward more positive patterns.
- Emotions as spiritual guidance system. Esther Hicks, as previously mentioned, sees the above and raises it by suggesting that 1. it is helpful to reach for a slightly better thought over and over throughout one’s day in order to keep moving back into alignment and happiness; 2. noticing when we’re feeling bad and learning to coach ourselves into better states allows us to accept the spiritual and physical gifts that are always available to us; 3. when we’re spending time in negative emotion, we’re resisting the best that life has to offer, and the emotions we feel are there to point us in the right direction. This viewpoint suggests that emotions are best interpreted as a signpost that can lead to progress if we take the time to stop and read it.
Again, I think all of these viewpoints have something excellent to offer us in our understanding of emotions and their place in balanced functioning. And yet, they generally address ways to improve emotional states without much thought as to how understanding the very personal meaning emotions have added to our lives can be instructive. This is yet another element that I now consider to be absolutely crucial in my understanding on this topic, and that is only beginning to be granted the attention I think it deserves. Psychological professionals have been working on this for over a hundred years, but in many ways this pursuit has been branded as the realm of people with serious mental and emotional health issues, people who aren’t able to function normally. Others who exhibit interest in emotional introspection are sometimes made fun of as far-out hippies who want to spend a ridiculous amount of time navel gazing. Yet in my experience, it’s helpful and healthy to take time every day to contemplate and address one’s emotional states—what’s been your dominant state, when have you felt out of control or stressed emotionally, and what can be done about that? Your mind can help you trace what’s bothering you and give you ideas about how to create solutions. It can also help you to imagine better ways of functioning, and rehearse those mentally so it’s easier to remember a new option next time the same kind of situation arises.
Even more important than the mental consideration of one’s emotions, however, is the act of honestly expressing what feels true and valid. Most of us are so conditioned not to do this with any regularity that it feels frightening and often seems overly negative and whiney. Even so, I have found that in expression are the seeds of all manner of healing, inspiration, and peace. I generally find that each form of expression will be more effective or less so for each person, but the act of expression itself is key to creating harmony and happiness. It’s just as essential to overall balance as physical activity, which is why I titled this blog post the way I did. The challenge is in finding a mode of expression that is both honest and fun for you without being destructive to others so that you can use it on a daily basis. Unexpressed emotion builds up over time and becomes long-term stress, and can even contribute directly to physical pain and discomfort.
Music, writing, visual art, storytelling, and other art forms can be enjoyable and constructive avenues for this emotional expression. While I absolutely love the arts, currently my favorite way to get this need for expression satisfied is through EFT/Tapping, because it’s so flexible and highly personalized and offers many efficient techniques for working through uncomfortable emotions. It can seem like a pretty odd thing to do at first, but for many people it quickly becomes a very welcome way to express constructively and lighten an emotional load that was standing in the way of forward motion and a positive outlook. As EFT proliferates, I think we’re going to see an increased awareness about the usefulness of venting emotion and stimulating positive emotional change for everyone, not just the people with serious concerns and traumas who end up working with psychological professionals.
Finally, I find that there’s a layer of meaning that can be extracted from getting clear on what we really feel. Emotions can be a powerful indicator of where you are out of alignment with your own values, whatever those may be. As just one example, if you act in a way that is out of keeping with what you consider to be right and appropriate behavior, you will likely end up feeling embarrassment or shame. Allowing yourself to admit how you feel and trace it back to your behavior allows you to become aware of how you wish you had acted, and work toward doing so next time. Going through this process is empowering if you are willing to take the time and deal with a bit of discomfort as you find your way to clarity. I think everyone deserves to feel empowered in this way, so I encourage you to try out some modes of emotional expression and see what helps you to feel greater clarity and freedom, and what you can enjoy so that you’ll be able to create this experience often. I have come to feel that the importance of having tools that work in this area cannot be overstated. There is so much joy to be had when you’re not using so much of your energy to deny how you really feel, or that you have emotions at all for that matter! And there is such a better life to be lived when we feel that something so influential as our emotions can empower as a rule rather than overwhelm and hinder. So find some emotional gym equipment and start trying it out. I think you’ll find that it really does improve your everyday experience in being you.
Fairness and Justice: Moving Targets
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.”
Another logical pairing of Maslowe’s preconditions to the pursuit of our human needs is that of fairness and justice. As with the other preconditions, if these are lacking in your world, it’s hard to focus on being your best self, so we’ll think through them a bit this week. They're similar concepts that I think are often differentiated by the question of degree; many people think of fairness as a nice idea that is rarely realized; you’ve probably heard someone tell a child at some point, “Life isn’t fair, so stop whining and walk it off,” or something similar. This imperative acknowledges the difficulties of achieving fairness, as well as, arguably, an insensitivity on the part of the speaker to the child’s feelings and an unwillingness to explain the matter further!
In the ideal, fairness would be an expression of equality in which two human beings are treated identically no matter what their various qualities and differences might be. In reality, it’s easy to see how it would be nearly impossible to treat every person in exactly the same manner, and not even appropriate to do so. For instance, should we allow a five-year-old to drive a car because older people are allowed to? Well, no—that’s an obviously terrible idea, but then the question becomes, which qualities create equality between human beings such that they should be treated identically, and that’s a complex question. The response to this difficulty is met with a variety of approaches across cultures, as the determination of who can be considered similar to whom will be based on local values. Fairness is a word that we often use around subjects that are not fraught with the kind of danger and importance to which we apply the word justice. The word brings to mind two people attempting to decide on what kind of fence to build between their properties, or the way a middle school teacher grades papers, rather than decisions that affect the course of history. We seem to apply it to situations that are not gross violations, but debatable conundrums. It’s a concept that any given group probably decides and polices in a less structured way because of its lower stakes, and the more a group shares similar values, the easier it will be for its members to negotiate solutions that seem fair across the board in any given instance.
Justice, on the other hand, is a term generally used for the formal rule system communicated through a region’s laws and judicial system. Those rules apply across all people who live within the borders of that region, no matter what their cultural influences. Laws are common agreements that sum up the group’s best thinking about how its members should behave. There will always be rules that individual members disagree with, but they govern anyway so that there can be certainty about expectations. There are many wonderful novels that explore visions of utopian living, and the more interesting ones show us the impossibility of creating conditions that will be perfect for everyone. The most we can expect is that our region’s rules will leave us mostly free to act as we prefer. Justice can also refer to the perceived “rightness” of an action or outcome. A region’s laws will take ideals of rightness into account, but they are, again, subjective. Today’s justice is tomorrow’s injustice. In today’s world, where so much information is easily shared, the best practices of many regions of the world are out there to be utilized and to inform local choices. A wider range of options can be considered for the best fit in a local system. New ideas spur more rapid change and more detailed refinements.
The justice meted out by a region’s judicial system, guided by clear written rules of law, lets us know that the culture will not stand for lack of equity on a grander scale, and makes it worthwhile for all to pay attention. Unlike fairness, this should make justice, at least in theory, harder than fairness to ignore or interpret. Of course, enormous amounts of time and money are still spent each year in the arguing of cases and how the written laws apply to each one! The proliferation of legal dramas on television attests to the spellbinding variety of ways in which many laws can be understood and argued. While a societal group holds sway over the rules of justice in that in can contribute to the process of changing laws over time, there are times when it does not seem that justice (as in the right result from a moral perspective) has been served in the moment because an antiquated law is still on the books, or a situation arises with new factors that haven’t been considered before. Not to mention a loophole having been exploited or a judge or jury proving to have an obvious bias. And yet, despite inevitable ambiguities, developed nations still make strong efforts to define legal rules so that clear lines of consequence can be obvious to citizens. When everyone knows what’s allowable and what isn’t, each can make his own choice about his actions, and understand the likely outcomes. Each can also understand her agreement or disharmony with the larger group, which can help her to understand her place in this region and whether she is willing to stay there. The alternative to having set rules would be chaos, which is not conducive to the health and happiness of most people; if chaos reigns, safety concerns draw us away from anything more rewarding that could be achieved in an environment of general stability.
Having a well-defined and well-communicated set of rules also accomplishes a few other things, including helping to map out ways to address what has happened in a given incident (and its aftermath), and how best to move forward following that incident for the safety of all:
· It helps people to decide whether those rules are effectively creating what they think of as justice from a moral perspective. It’s normal for values to shift over time. As they do, those people governed by a particular set of laws can decide separately or as a group that the rules should change to reflect new values, and band together in order to create the change they see as necessary
· Those who run afoul of the rules are punished in some way, which may deter others from risking taking the same kinds of actions. Without consequences, more individuals might dare to flout the rules and cause havoc in a previously orderly system
· The feelings of outrage of victims or other observers at the lawbreaker’s behavior may be satisfied by recompense of some sort being required. This may restore a sense of fairness being upheld in the group; this is an emotional and moral consideration regarding balancing out the scales regarding a former incident
· The public may be kept safer from those who are imprisoned or lose privileges because of unlawful behavior. This is a functional, purely mechanical consideration about doing the best thing going forward from a problematic incident
As for the interplay between the two concepts, if fairness is not a common concept or value in a particular region, it’s also less likely that this region’s judicial system will treat all citizens equitably. For instance, if racial or religious biases are rampant, there may be an unwritten agreement by the majority that all people deserve equal treatment except those in one of the groups that is out of favor, which implies that fairness is not a strong principle here; if women are considered to be less valuable than men, say, there may be entirely different laws in place covering their actions and rights. Even in the United States right now, which likes to pride itself on being a free and modern nation, we still see vestiges of old ideas about women’s place in society played out in the fact that on average, women still earn about 21% less than men who do the same exact job. There’s currently a lot of work being done in the corporate world on changing this stubborn fact, but old ways of thinking and behaving die hard, and for centuries it was completely in vogue to think of women as separate and unequal to men—a completely different commodity with much different value in dollars and cents. “Fairness” that applied among men didn’t apply to women, and that was considered to be obvious and only right. The idea of fairness that many cultures are striving toward now includes similar rules applying to both men and women, though some may vary based on obvious differences. But, of course, there will always be room for confusion as our understanding of differences changes; for example, women are now allowed to serve in the U.S. military, but their progress in having opportunities for career advancement has been slow, and in the event of a draft, women are not included because they are still considered to be fundamentally less suited to combat, and positions that support it, than men. I imagine that, to some modern men in the military, that might be seen as unfair! So even if fairness is a common value, the complexities of life and the progress of ideas mean that it still may not be applied equitably.
Both fairness and justice are imprecise, complicated concepts that will always be imperfectly expressed, but an attempt at them supports societal agreement, conflict resolution, and safety. They help to create a framework in which we can expect to operate as we go about our pursuit of happiness, hopefully with something of a sense of clarity. They support order in the group, another precondition that we looked at last week, and lay out a code of conduct to which we must adhere if we want to remain at liberty. They also give us recourse if someone else is violating our stated rights, which can also contribute to our feelings of safety and stability. Anyone who has been on the wrong side of unfairness knows that it’s not an enjoyable experience. It’s confusing and frustrating, and it can be hard to understand how to avoid it in the future, which can be a real blow to confidence. Anyone who has experienced injustice knows that it can be heartbreaking and incredibly disruptive to one’s life. Structures and customs that help us to avoid these results help to create an environment in which people can thrive. Feeling that you have choices regarding how you relate to issues of fairness and justice is empowering. Consider, then:
· Do you make an effort to treat others fairly?
· Do you include what you know to be local understandings of fairness or moral justice in your consideration of possible actions, or only your own preferences?
· Do you respond thoughtfully to feedback you receive from others about their perceptions of your fairness?
· Do you explain why you make choices to others who will be affected by those decisions, or better yet, involve them in the decision-making process?
· If there are laws where you live that you don’t agree with, do you comply with them? Do you make an effort to change them?
· How do you regard those in a position of trying to uphold your region’s laws?
· Do you ever advocate for fewer or no rules? If so, have you thought through how it would feel to have no recourse against others in those areas?
Are there issues in how you relate to these concepts that you could benefit from thinking through further? Feel free to comment below about anything you realized as you read this post.