Pain Is Inevitable, Suffering Is Optional

Let me start by saying that this post is a generalization.  I have no intention of minimizing anyone’s pain.  I am in no position to do so.  Also, I am aware that I need to continually put in the work to listen to and practice everything I say in these videos.  That being said, because I have found value in this perspective and so I offer it to others who may benefit from it.  If it doesn’t speak to you, feel free to ignore its existence.  That being said and without further ado I ask you…

Have you ever found yourself sitting in a room alone thinking about everything you’ve been through and trying to make sense of the pain in your life? I know I have a few times in my life and I know many other people who have as well (Probably everyone I’ve ever met).  For a long time, I had this ability to just let things be what they were.  I didn’t let myself stress too much or worry too much because I really didn’t want me to let myself live through the pain more than once.  I didn’t even like telling people what I was going through because I observed that people had an uncanny ability to make up terrible stories about whatever I shared.  As I tried to process things, I found that telling certain people only made it worse.  Later I would have to talk myself out of the stories that my mind came up with in addition to the stories other people made up.  So I decided to not tell myself stories about what my pains meant or the stories the other people told me about what they thought my pain meant or what their own pain meant.

Unfortunately, this ability frustrated many people who tried to deal with me.  But enough stories.  Here’s what you need to know.  We can choose the stories we tell ourselves about our pain.  If we tell terrible stories things can get worse.  If we tell better stories, things can get better.  But the best way I’ve experienced, is to consider God’s story of who we are.  I am not going to pretend that the stories will make the pain go away–only that it has the potential to transform how you experience the pain that inevitably comes.  If you doubt this potential, I simply invite you to pick some pain that has been haunting you or that you fear could haunt you in the future and just tell yourself a good story about it.  If it helps and you are disciplined enough, write the story down.  Then check in on your feelings after telling yourself this new story and see how you feel.  I’d love to hear your comments if you’re willing to share.  In the meantime, I will keep telling myself the story that transforms how I experience pain–we are all God’s children and everything we experience has the potential to lead us back to an awesome reality that we cannot even fathom from here.

What Is Your Profession?

It seems that recently, I am running into more and more people who are tired of the “rat race” that is American life.  More people seem to be getting disillusioned with the idea that for the rest of their lives they are going to have to sell their time for money often doing things that they have little to no interest in.  Some of them are responding by starting their own businesses. Some are responding by taking more time off to be with their loved one and cultivating a que sera sera mindset. And some are spending more time doing creative endeavors in order to cultivate their talents.  The happiest people I know are people who have somehow managed to do all three at once. And the saddest are those people who have already given up and are just burying their heads until they get laid off or die. Then there are people like me who are stumbling their way through this life picking up clues as I go and shifting as necessary. Then of course there are also those people who just love making money for money’s sake.  They’ll be fine no matter what because frankly they aren’t thinking about any of this stuff I am talking about anyway, so there’s no conflict and they will always do whatever they have to do to survive–by hook or by crook.

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So, If you watched the video, you know that the point I am trying to make in this post is that we become what we profess. While many of us think of our “profession” as our job, it more accurately has to do with the vows we make in life with our words, work, deeds, and our very being.  Even though most of us Americans seem to define ourselves by our jobs, very few of us give much thought to the fact that often we cease to be people, and rather, become extensions of our jobs. In essence we are slaves. Sure, you could say that we are free, but if we were really free we would know that we have a choice about whether or not or at least how we would like to participate in this people project that is our country.  But really how many of us feel free?  If we were free, we would profess that above other things.  And more of us would allow ourselves to cultivate the God given talents and gifts that each of us have.  But instead, most of us just do what we are advised to do by external sources.  We become such a big part of the production line that even our desires are manufactured.  I’m convinced that most of us don’t even really want the things we think we want or even like the things we say we like.  We have just been professing the status quo so much that we can’t tell what we really feel or desire. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m not and you want to shift, what can we do about it?  Well I think it all starts with imagination. Creating a world from within and then professing it without.

Recently I got to learn more about one of the parents from the bus stop where I drop off my daughter in the morning.  She happens to be an artist.  In our brief conversations, I was able to learn a little about the different types of art she does.  Her art is very eclectic and very thought provoking.  What really amazed me was that her work invited me into spaces I had never seen, because she created art that I would have never conceived of like the one above.  When I saw this picture and some of her other work, I felt this sense of relief.  I was just happy to see so many out of the box works.  It reminded me that within each of us is this infinite resource of creativity and imagination.  I look at my daughter and hr friends and remember that it is something that we are all born with and as youths we profess the limitless nature of our being.  But then one day we start professing that we are this or that and then the more we say it the more we become it.  After a while we forget how much more we are.  We profess, “I am a teacher, a parent, a divorcee, a home owner, a vacationer, a Pats Fan… yadda yadda yadda.”  And that’s it.  That’s all we seem to be.  But that’s not all we are. We are so much more.

Because I choose to experience myself as more, I am professing it to others that they are more.  I’m at the point where I don’t even care if anyone is listening. I am just going to profess it because I know that I will become whatever I profess–that is I will become the vows I make through my words, works, deeds, and very being.  I also know that if I hang out with other who are professing that they are more than the work they do or the roles they play, then this awareness will be even more established in me.  Does that make sense?  Well if so, reach out.  With all these forms of communication, there’s no excuse for more people willing to make this profession not connecting.

Are We All Addicted To Drudge?

I have heard many people say that in order to be happy you must make money by doing something you love.  Back in the day that idea probably sounded insane.  The majority of people seemed to have to struggle just to get by with the work they could get, so who had the novelty of thinking about doing what they loved to do.  They did what they had to do to survive. But over the years, the opportunity to do what we love has become more realistic for a larger number of people.  I estimate that there are more people financing their lives through their own creative endeavors than ever in history.  In countries like the USA there are children growing up with parents who have been able to work from home, make money selling things online, write and create eBooks and apps and more while sitting in their swimming trunks.  I know I have intentions of going in that direction.  I want my work to be what I love and I don’t want to do something that I don’t enjoy in order to live a lifestyle that I don’t need.  But my question is, will that make me any happier? I don’t think so.

There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.–William Bennett

I think happiness is a choice people make that has surprisingly little to do with what people have or what they do.  I think conditional happiness is a big scam.  I know people who have the jobs or businesses that afford them the opportunity to do things that most of us could never see ourselves doing.  I know people born into wealth and I know people who have literally won the lottery, but can I tell you that these people are not always happy or even frequently happy.  No.  The best I can say is that what they have and do affords them more opportunities than the average person to distract themselves from how miserable they are otherwise.  I have no problem telling you that out of most of my friends I am on the lowest end of the financial spectrum, but I cannot say that any of them are happier than me.

Now does that mean I am going to support the BS belief that poor people are happier?  Heck no!  That is just something guilty wealthy people tell themselves.  My poor friends are just as unhappy as my wealthier friends.  It is just easier for them to point at what they think is bothering them.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard poor people say things like “It will all be better if I just had more money” or my wealthier friends talk about the perils of lasting comfort.  Meanwhile some of the poor people will buy $200 sneakers and the wealthy people will go on a vacation that can finance a family of fifty in a poor country for a year while feeling guilty about being rich.  At the risk of offending people that I love, I have to say that it all sounds insane to me.  I have it my mind to create a match-up site called “takemymoney.com” where guilty rich people can give all of their extra money away to sad poor people.  Shouldn’t that make everyone happy? It makes logical sense doesn’t it.  But I assure you it won’t do a thing except create another distraction.  In no time, the now “happy” people will find something else to make them feel crappy.  That’s what we do.  It’s like we are all addicted to drudge.

drudge [drəj] noun

noun: drudge; plural noun: drudges

1. 1.

   a person made to do hard, menial, or dull work.

What do I mean when I say that we are addicted to drudge?  Well what I mean is that in my experience, we are very skilled at finding things that make our lives harder, more meaningless, and duller than they have to be.  For research for this blog, I watched the movie, I’m Still Here, Joaquin Phoenix’s documentary about his retirement from acting and his foray into hip hop.  I can’t believe I watched as much as I did.  It was a like watching a human emotional train wreck.  I don’t know if it was real or a mockumentary, but I can tell you that I would not be surprised by a person putting in that much work to destroy their own lives.  If this was a farce, then Phoenix is a genius and an enlightened being for using his life to create art in this way because so many of us put ourselves through this sort of thing on so many different levels unconsciously.  For him to act as if he were going through this so authentically would seem to require an almost controlled schizophrenia. I recommend watching it and looking for yourself in it.  It is quite an exercise. I can see myself feeling some of the feelings that Phoenix talked about although I would express them differently.  It’s as if–in a strange way–we’re all trying to be something and nothing at the same time.  We love to dream and are simultaneously afraid for those dreams to come true.  When the dreams come true it is almost like a kind of death.  As soon as we achieve what we thought would make us happy, we inevitably ask ourselves the question, “Now what?”

There are a lot of theories of why we cannot be satisfied with happiness.  The one that I think has the most validity is the idea that we are addicted to our emotions.  I think it is this addiction that forces us to put ourselves through things that we can avoid and to seek out and often create situations that will give us the emotional high or low that we believe we need.  I would get into the science of it, but if you are interested, you can just check out the last link I added.  I suggest you give the idea some thought. If you have been asking yourself why you do some of the crazy things you do, this just might give you some insight on what you can do differently.

Are You the Hunter or the Hunted?

I bet when most people see the question in the title they will think that the answer I am looking for is the hunter. But they’d be wrong.  Actually I’m not looking for either option.  I’m just messing with you to set up what I want to say in this post.  If you watched the video, you would know that my thought for that particular day was on how so many of us live our lives as if we are chasing something or being chased by something.  I blah blah blahed about how I don’t get it and really have no interest in living my life that way.  Now keep in mind that, like everything else in life, there is a time to be hunted and a time to hunt. For example, if I dropped a brown paper bag full of $100 bills, I would hope that someone would hunt after me to return it like some of those heroes on Yahoo! news have done.  And as far as being a hunter, I am about to launch a new consultant business, so I will have to do some hunting for a while until word of mouth gets out and I become the hunted, which will be awesome.  So you see, I do not have anything against either of these modes of being.  They exist for a reason.  I just don’t want to be stuck in either mode.  And that’s what I’m talking about in the video.

This guy’s literally under stress.

In case you didn’t get the picture, stress kills.  But only when you over do it.  There will always be situations that call for a level of stress, but when the situation is over, it is time to move on.  Now depending on the situation, that might be easier said than done, but in reality, much of the stress we put ourselves through on a daily basis is just inappropriate to the situation.  Consider the guy I mentioned in the video.  Chances are he wasn’t going anywhere that called for that Evil Knievel move he pulled off.  At least I pray he didn’t have an emergency.  But even if he did, it’s not like he’s the only person driving the wrong way against traffic in the metaphoric sense. Many of us are.  And as I mentioned, at times I get tempted or might do the same thing.  But in the end, it is all about the contextual framework out of which we live.  If life for you means, that thing you do until you die, then you may find yourself feeling like you are always being pursued by or going toward death.  However, if you see life as eternity in action, you may see that you are a part of that which never ends.  Like light and dark, life and death cannot occupy the same space–therefore, life has no fear of death. It does not run from it, nor does it approach it.  And ultimately that was what I was trying to convey in the video.

It is true that there was a time where the categories of the hunter and the hunted were sufficient to categorize the majority of people.  But we are now entering a time of common enlightenment.  There is actually no reason why anyone on this planet should go a night without their basic needs met, which in turn would offer the everyday person the opportunity to get in touch with their creativity and be present.  For millenia, the search for food preoccupied most people.  They had to hunt.  It is different now, but very few of us have gotten the memo.  We don’t know that we are safe and so we keep running and we scare others with our good intentions.  We bought what the fear-mongers are selling and have been selling since language became a thing and that is “fear of the future”.  Sadly even the most well intentioned of us are still bought into it.  The fact is that we cannot escape the past through the gate of future fears.  All we can do is get present and start to live from a place of safety–from that place that all can be well, all will be well, and–in fact–all is well.  What kind of world would we have if more of us lived from this space.

Recently one of my good friends started sharing her thoughts on this on her new blog called Our Path.  She’s one example of the new wave of people choosing to live from that place of safety.  She doesn’t fall in the category of the Hunter or the Hunted, but in this new category of paradigm shifters I like to call The Present.  Check her out and thank for hanging with me here.