We can’t receive a rich life if we refuse to fall out of love with our miseries and tortured storylines about what is happening, has happened, or might happen. When we stoke our misfortunes all day, fueling them with attention and energy, they burn it all up — and with it, a truer image of our lives.
The experience of an abundant life and self-pity oppose each other. Do we want to worry, resent, and blame our way through a tragic, underperforming life or let them go and make space for what makes us happy and brings us calm? If it’s the latter, we have to coax our instincts into trusting situations and people that don’t hurt us. We can’t allow punishment to turn us on.
We can move forward without anyone approving our choices. If we continually have to prove ourselves, we’ve already lost. Justifying and explaining waste time. It’s enough to validate and be present to our own experience. Having our own back will catapult us past needing anyone’s permission.
When we squeeze out all the lessons we need from our consequences, we can leave the pain in the past instead of feeding on it today. We are not as unique as egos would have us believe. People have been solving problems identical to ours for millennia. Of course we can do what they did. What’s more, we won’t have to work ourselves to death to get there. Or be perfect. Or bury ourselves in guilt and regret.
Simply put, we don’t have to destroy ourselves. It doesn’t serve anyone. And if it does, those people shouldn’t be there.
Self-sacrifice verging on abandonment needn’t be the only way through. We can see our pain through the lens of the beauty available to us in people and in art — books, movies, and music. We can purge it through our bodies. Through adventure. And through Love.
None of it works, though, if we’re still gripping the self-centered dramatics and entitlement that distract us from it. We have to want peace more than we want anything. We have to want it more than we want to respond. We have to want it more than we want to be a do-gooder who everyone likes and approves of, who doesn’t cause too much trouble, or ask for anything. We don’t have to earn love to atone for our being alive, taking up space, and having needs. If that’s a burden to someone, too bad. We have to be more turned on by the unknown than by the decaying past.
We deserve to reserve our fiercest loyalty for ourselves. The world will be fine without us running around trying to save everyone, hoping they’ll do the same for us (they don’t). If we can stop focusing on anyone else and choose to act rather than ruminate, each new day becomes an opportunity to make things better for ourselves. It’s okay to receive without bracing for loss. Our dues are paid.
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I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.
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More Essays
Exist. And don’t apologize for it.
We’ve built an economy out of our own existence — guilt as currency, martyrdom as proof we’re good, self-punishment as payment. But there is no debt, and peace is available.
How We Get Up Matters
We’re fixated on growth, but growth isn’t maturity. This is about what actually happens when we fall and what it costs to get back up as the soul instead of the ego.
So Many Sources, So Little Relief
Life is always calling us. It tells us plainly, this is what we are to do and this is where we are to go. It’s an invisible pipeline between us and the energy of our soul that we’re born with.
The Mind Turns on the Passive
We only work on problems we believe have a solution. Everything else — precedent, other people’s opinions, the weight of “it can’t be done” — is a story the mind tells itself to stop looking. This is what happens when it starts looking again, and what happens when it doesn’t.
The Gap Between Us and Everything
There’s a gap most of us maintain without noticing, between ourselves and the universal energy running under everything. We call it being realistic. We call it caution. Passion is the one thing that actually closes it, and resignation is not the same as peace.
Ok. So now what?
Let the mistake be just that — a mistake. Not an omen, not an albatross. What comes next is a question of fact, not feeling.