Tag Archives: Pain

THE POWER OF MAGIC ELIXIR

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.” ~Honoré de Balzac

Solitude and meditation are a combination of the most powerful tools known to mankind, provided one can eventually swap them out for the equally powerful tool of magic elixir.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s not make the mistake of putting the cart in front of the horse. In order to discover magic elixir, one must first dare solitude and meditation. This requires a Hero’s Journey of sorts: a separation phase, an initiation phase, and a return phase. Let’s break it down.

Into the Wild (Separation Phase):

“It is what one takes into solitude that grows there, the beast within included.” ~Nietzsche

Sometimes the only way to realize that life is beautiful is to look at it in a beautiful way.

This is not a plea for donning rose-colored glasses. Not at all. It is an appeal to leave the all-too-familiar rust, dust, dullness, naivete, softness, and fragility of the comfort zone. It’s a call to beauty, the beauty of adventure. The beauty of living between worlds and gaining the wherewithal to migrate back and forth.

Solitude is powerful because it separates us from the rat race and reveals interconnected beauty. We go from being a rat in a cage to a creature enthralled by its connection with Nature as a whole. We go from being a millstone in a daily grind to being a whetstone that we can sharpen ourselves against. We go from being a cog in the clockwork to an alarm clock that awakens us to higher awareness. In solitude, we can no longer pretend that we are asleep.

Most members of the herd never taste solitude. They get caught up in the rat race, trapped in their cultural conditioning, stuck in religious indoctrination, or imprisoned in political brainwashing. They lose sight of the underlying essence. They sacrifice their wildness for mildness. And when it comes that their life requires a little bite, they discover that they have no teeth.

Solitude rewilds the domesticated animal and teaches it how to regrow its teeth. In conservation biology the term “rewilding” is the rehabilitation process of captive animals. In the case of rewilding the world, or The Great Rewilding, the captive animal just happens to be human.

Understand: rewilding does not mean regressing. It’s not a call back into the cave. Not at all. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s the call of the wild which helps us realize that civilization has become the modern-day Plato’s Cave. The call of the wild is the heart’s longing for itself to become open-hearted once again. Rewilding is simply a healthy means toward achieving that end.

Rewilding begins within. If you rewild yourself again and again, you might earn the right to rewild the world.

Learn to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it. Solitude will break you. That’s fine. Let it. You have to feel your brokenness. You have to fall in love with it. Otherwise, you will only ever be a fool of your hope and never authentically hopeful.

The Hope-fool, Hopeless, Hopeful Dynamic (Initiation Phase):

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” ~Joseph Campbell

Confucius described the “fasting of the heart” as a form of meditation which leads to letting our preconceptions go and making room to receive.

The Hope-fool enters their solitude filled with preconceptions and expectations. Their cup is overflowing with delusions of grandeur and pigeonholed meaning. They have yet to bring their own meaning to life because they are drowning in the delusion that existence is meaningful.

In order to bring one’s own meaning to life, the individual must die to their preconceived notion that life is meaningful. That is to say, the individual must become hopeless.

Losing all hope is the beginning of meaningful hope. It’s the crossing of the first threshold. It’s surrendering to the fall into the rabbit hole. It’s taking the red pill after forsaking the blue. It’s embracing the Desert of the Real upon exiting Plato’s Cave. It’s “making room to receive.” What does one receive? Truth. Hard truth. The harsh truth that reality is fundamentally meaningless.

This harsh truth is a dark gift. It’s the psychological death of the old self and the birth of a new more capable self. It’s a painful rebirth. It’s tempest-testing, honor-honing, humor-sharpening. The reward is deep insight.

This deep insight forms a mirror inside us which reflects the world as it is rather than how we were conditioned, indoctrinated, or brainwashed into seeing it. From this deep reflection we become a drop on Indra’s Web, reflecting the whole. We fractal out. We fractal in. We interconnect. The hope-fool collapses into hopelessness only to be resurrected into Hope, into providence. The uninitiated (Hope-fool) becomes the initiated (hopeless) becomes individuated (Hopeful).

Hopelessness is the crucible in which the elixir is cooked. Hope is the integration, containment, and encapsulation of the elixir that makes it magical.

Provident Reciprocity (The Return Phase):

“Everything that is formulated becomes more tolerable.” ~Emil Cioran

Having gleaned otherworldly secrets (deep wisdom, hopeless love, the experience of survival), it’s now time to transform it all into art.

Pain is the magic ingredient within art that makes it meaningful, valuable, and worthwhile. Art without pain is mere makeup. Art infused with pain is transcendent, otherworldly, transformative and transportive. The pain strikes at the heart of the human condition and drags us into heightened levels of experience.

This reveals a profound revelation: the heart of hope is hopelessness. It’s yin-yang perfect. It’s existentially masochistic. These are the profound ingredients of the storytelling medicine of magic elixir.

It’s painful to put yourself out there. It’s painful to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the innovators, and the creators of magic elixir. They bring hard-earned secrets back to the tribe as a gift of tough love. They choose to become medicine, which could only be discovered while in the deep throes of allowing the journey to be the thing (hopelessness). Then they bring that powerful medicine back to the tribe in the form of hope.

Magic elixir is a squaring of the circle. It’s a hacking of the mind of God. Where the circle is the infinite interconnectedness between all things (God) and the square is the magic elixir (the meaning which contains it) that we bring back to the world.

Those carrying magic elixir have access to the crossroads between Nature and the human soul. They can bridge the gap between the sacred and the banal. It’s on the bridge back to the tribe where they repackage and recode their wisdom. They take what they learned in the wild and develop new forms of courage and endurance which they inject into their elixir.

They have learned how to compress Infinity into bounded form. They fit it into a frame, a book, a painting, a potion, or even a red pill. They bring it back to the tribe, or they leave it on the trail for others to discover. It becomes legendary, mythological, something that ordinary people can get drunk on and gain access to extraordinary experience.

Cultural transformation is the raison d’être of magic elixir. It keeps culture progressively evolving in a healthy way so that it doesn’t become stagnant, congealed, or stuck in dead patterns.

This provident reciprocity does not end. No. Process over outcome. Journey over destination. Those who once dared solitude must dare again. They are too busy connecting the finite with the infinite, dancing between worlds, and bridging gaps with mystic recalibrations and relearned myth to be overwhelmed by the tribe. They must flip scripts. They must turn tables. They must keep rediscovering solitude and returning with updated magic elixir that will continue to overwhelm the tribe.

It’s better to focus on where you are going than how you are feeling

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By Christian Jarrett

Source: aeon

The notion that emotional pain and suffering reflect a deviation from a default happy baseline has been referred to as the ‘assumption of healthy normality’. But it’s a mistaken assumption. Estimates of the lifetime prevalence of psychiatric disorders indicate that around one in two adults will meet the criteria for a mental-health condition at some point in their lives. Given that psychological pain is so ubiquitous, we should focus less on what might make us happy, and more on achieving a sense of meaning, regardless of how we’re feeling. Psychotherapy should help people manage effective functioning while they are distressed, above and beyond aiming to reduce symptoms such as difficult thoughts, emotions and sensations. Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) takes this approach, using mindfulness, acceptance and other behavioural strategies to promote more flexible and value-driven behaviours. The goals in ACT are not necessarily to change or reduce one’s problematic thoughts or emotions, but to foster meaningful and effective behaviours regardless of mood, motivation or thinking. In other words, the primary goal is to promote what therapists call ‘valued living’.

Think of valued living as going about your daily life in the service of values that you find important, whereby engaging in these actions creates a sense of meaning and purpose. From an ACT perspective, symptoms of psychiatric disorders, and psychological suffering more broadly, are problematic when they are linked to rigid behaviours that pull us away from valued living. We might not have any control over the pain we experience – in fact, our emotional pain is profoundly human – but one area where we can exert some control is what we do in response to that suffering. Many common responses to difficult thoughts and emotions – such as avoidance, substance abuse, withdrawal and aggression – can alleviate distress in the short term, but also lead to long-term damage in our relationships, our jobs, our freedom and our personal growth – the very areas that provide that sense of meaning and purpose. By letting go of an agenda guided by minimising pain, and recalibrating toward a more value-driven agenda, our choices can be based on who we want to be, rather than how we want to feel.

In their 2013 study, the psychologists Todd Kashdan and Patrick McKnight of George Mason University in Virginia examined the day-to-day relationships between valued living and wellbeing in a sample of individuals with social anxiety disorder. This is a common but debilitating condition that’s marked by intense fear of social situations that might involve being negatively judged by others. People with social anxiety disorder often want and value positive relationships but considerable distress makes them avoid social interactions, so this is an excellent group in which to examine values and meaning.

In the study, participants began by identifying their central aim or purpose in life (eg, ‘trying to be a good role model to others’). Then, each day over the next two weeks, they rated their daily efforts and progress toward this goal, and provided daily ratings of their self-esteem, meaning in life, and experience of positive and negative emotions. On days when they reported investing greater effort toward their main life goal, they also tended to enjoy greater wellbeing: they said their life had more meaning, and they scored higher on self-esteem and the experience of positive emotions. Importantly, support was not found for the reverse path – greater wellbeing did not predict greater effort or progress toward strivings. This study highlights that sometimes we need to make the value-guided choice, regardless of how we feel.

If only it were so easy, though. For this reason, in ACT-based treatments, there is substantial focus on skills and techniques that can assist one in cultivating a more aware, willing and tolerant stance toward difficult feelings and other internal experiences. This stands in explicit contrast to a ‘do X and your distress will alleviate’ approach. The ACT techniques are not in the service of changing emotional states – they are in the service of facilitating valued action.

The effectiveness of ACT across different diagnoses and problem areas shows that committing to the benefits of valued living transcends traditional diagnostic categories. In addition to anxiety disorders, in studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and resilience, chronic pain, suicidal ideation and many more, engaging in behaviours consistent with personally held values has been linked to a range of positive outcomes.

Which brings me back to my work as a therapist. While the breadth of exercises and techniques employed in ACT is beyond the scope of this article, there is one exercise I’d like to share that has helped some of my clients see the inextricable link between valued living and painful experiences. In this activity (of which there are different variations), the therapist first asks the client to write on an index card some of the internal experiences they are struggling with most – difficult thoughts and judgments, emotions, memories.

I ask them, what do you notice when you read that index card? I feel awful, I don’t want this. What do you want to do with the card? I want to throw it in the trash. Then the client flips the card over, and I ask them to write out some of the things that are most important, most meaningful to them – being a parent, caring and supporting others, learning, growing, etc. What do you notice when you read this side? Warmth, it feels right, this is who I want to be. Where is the pain, where is the other stuff? Still here, on the other side of the card. What happens if you push that pain away, escape or avoid it? I push the meaningful stuff away too. In your heart of hearts, what does your experience tell you right now? If I’m going to do the things that are important to me, be the person that I want to be, I also have to make room for the painful stuff.

In my experience, this is both an emotionally difficult exercise and also one that helps a person grasp that it’s impossible to disentangle pain and valued living. Sometimes it is hard to engage with those struggles in session, but we regularly return to the rationale of the approach – that maybe a different stance toward pain is necessary. And that is the crux of the work in ACT – opening up to the demons, judgments and suffering that lie underneath, all for the purpose of moving toward that which is meaningful.

The valued path is not necessarily the happy path. Social connectedness sometimes brings us in contact with memories of abuse and trauma. Being a parent stirs up doubts, uncertainty and feelings of anxiety, fear, anger and shame. Advocating for social justice requires repeated exposure to the inequities in our societies and the feelings of helplessness that can come from fighting for an equality that might not exist until after you’re gone. But a growing body of psychological research suggests that the valued path is the more workable one, whereas the happy path can be more of an illusion.

For readers who would like to find out more, I recommend the book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (2005) co-authored by the founder of ACT, Steven Hayes, and also Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong (2010) co-authored by another ACT pioneer, Kelly Wilson. And here is the international directory of ACT therapists, maintained by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science.

The Power of Vulnerability

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By Milan Karmeli

Source: Collective Evolution

Vulnerability is about being honest, and this includes embracing our dark side. No matter whether we find ourselves on the conservative spectrum or liberal, we often abuse morals and ideals in order to avoid our own shadow. In this turbulent ‘Trump era,’  where values fly high for all sides, vulnerability could become the currency that returns our sanity. My intention here is not political, but recent events coinciding with personal ones have created some urgency around the issue.

In the name of righteousness and higher ideals — personal, social, or political — we often establish a perimeter of comforting beliefs around us. This way we don’t need to face our own fear and insecurity. Instead of taking responsibility for our insufficiencies, we respond with judgment and morality. Fearing to face our simplicity and delicate humanity, we try proving our sophistication through how good, spiritual, or moral we are. Survival at any cost justifies the means to an end, but is basic survival what we really want?

If you’re interested in understanding how comfortable you are with your own vulnerability, take a moment to sense how you respond to abandonment, rejection, judgment, or betrayal. 

Vulnerability Wasn’t Top Priority Growing Up

For most of us, childhood experiences left lasting imprints. When we got out of line, according to the values and needs of others, judgment or ridicule often followed. It became unsafe to express feelings and fears. Almost as a natural consequence, we began pretending that we don’t need anything and can do it ourselves. Hiding our true needs became the best strategy and we embarked on a journey of manipulating our way through life. To say the least, we became creative in coming up with ways to keep our true needs hidden — even from ourselves. 

We learned to trust that suffering shown through sadness, crying, or pain point to or represent our vulnerability, though even these seemingly obvious markers may not really be signs of such at all. Often they are more representative of (un)conscious of manipulation of our partners. It’s safer to express needs through suffering. Not from bad intentions, but because it’s not as exposing.

What we call a ‘need’ easily turns into ‘demand.’ And what we often call ‘vulnerability’ becomes our personal way of blackmail and punishment. Even waiting silently and lonely for a response after an argument can ‘look and feel’ vulnerable. However, deep down hides a righteous expectation to be seen or heard. If we look close, we can discover pain buried beneath.

Practicing Vulnerability With Those Close to Us Makes Us More Human

When we’re truly vulnerable, we don’t use morality as a weapon in judging who’s right or wrong. What we do is recognize and acknowledge our feelings, fears, and needs. We do not generalize or base our arguments on past events, but respond to the feelings stirred through a specific event. We take off our masks and become available to ourselves and others. In many ways, we actually choose to become choice-less.

Betrayal, sacrifice, and other patterns that result in disappointment become central themes in our close relationships, but this is mainly because we enter those connections protected and guarded in the first place. Sacrifice, for example, is a tricky form of manipulation. We feel pain and righteousness at the same time. Sacrifice always leaves us with anger in our belly and the sense of missed opportunities.

I remember the deep pain I felt when my partner rejected my attempts to ‘help’ her time and time again. My response was to shut down and give her the silent treatment, while at times also throwing some moral judgment her way, such as “I give you everything I have, and what about you?”. But was I open when I gave so much, or rather feeling morally superior by loving ‘more’? I placed myself in an untouchable place and at the same time lost my vulnerability.

In relationships with those close to us we have a rare opportunity to exit the spiral of survival that gives us the illusion of staying on top of our game. That place which makes us believe we’re protected by high ideals, values, and other virtues — and sometimes also by self-judgment that we’re evil beyond repair. 

Search for truth is a delicate process and doesn’t follow any defined path other than facing the complexity of our human existence as honestly, responsibly, and sincerely as we can. So long as we choose our personal safety and false importance, we prevent the power of vulnerability to guide us back to our hearts.

Vulnerability Can Be One of Our Greatest Teachers

There’s a big difference between saying and feeling things, and so a sentence like “I don’t need anything and can do it alone” can easily slip off our tongue. Nevertheless, the pain of loneliness and abandonment remains. There is no doubt that we can and could do many things by ourselves, like raising children, being without close friends, a lover, touch, recognition and the list goes on. 

But what we really want is to learn to express our fears, and needs. Our demand for acknowledgment, the requirement to have our needs satisfied, or maintaining moral high ground, all leave us in a state of fight, in which receiving becomes impossible. Vulnerability forms the basis for our receptivity.

In expressing true vulnerability we hold the ground for our feelings and needs. We sense it as a state of integrity in which we accept the totality and complexity of our human imperfection. It’s a place of power, in which we accept that we need and thereby acknowledge our dependency on each other. It’s empowering when we connect with our humility and simplicity.

Where to begin being vulnerable?

Vulnerability is best expressed in the “I” form. We take responsibility for our own state of mind and feelings, and don’t hold our partners prisoners to our moral standards and ideals. We don’t use sacrifice, guilt, shame, or judgment to drive our point across.

It’s challenging, since it leaves us with little or no protection other than the acceptance of who we are. The “I” form takes the guessing game out of the relationship, where we expect our partners to ‘know’ what we fear, feel, or need. 

This way those close to us can decide to satisfy our needs or not. Everything else turns into an expectations game in which there are no winners, and this triggers resistance. They feel manipulated. And for us, vulnerability holds the key to accepting more parts in ourselves, which forms the basis of coming out of hiding and denial, and into our light.

Love and Let Love: Overcoming Egocentric Love

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By Gary Z. McGee

Source: The Mind Unleashed

“Love could be labeled poison and we’d drink it anyway.” ~Atticus

Love is a tricky subject. It’s multifaceted, both subjectively and objectively. It’s both lost and found within the complex folds of our unique mind-body-spirit dynamic. It’s both a spiraling in and a spiral out. We all know the “feeling” of love, but we can’t seem to describe it to each other. But boy do we try: in poetry, in song, in dance, in bed. Even in art.

Unfortunately, the predominant love paradigm in our culture is egocentric, ownership-based love. We live in a world where relationships are mostly based upon materialism, ownership and immediate gratification. It’s almost like we’re conditioned to consume to the point that we “consume” each other. Even the words we use toward each other imply ownership.

It’s sad. But no condition is insurmountable. We can recondition ourselves to form healthy relationships based upon respect, honesty, and trust. We can update the love paradigm into one of soul-centric, relationship-based love. But first we need to recognize each other as opposite sides of the same being. Our yin-yang dynamic is more dynamic than we tend to allow it to be.

The thing is, our language is dreadfully inadequate to do the concept of love any justice. There are over seven-billion people on the planet and we each have a different psycho-physiological reaction to any given stimuli, however minute that difference. And with abstract stimuli such as Love, Consciousness, and God, that difference is magnified.

The fact is: we each have our own definition for the concept of love (ego), but that definition is written in a language older than words (soul). So how do we understand this language? Simply put: mindfulness. More complexly put: we must become aware of what our mind-body-spirit is telling us, and then be honest about that information regarding our relationships. And poetically put: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” ~Mary Oliver

The ability to love (vulnerability):

“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.” ~Brene Brown

Our ability to love another person is predetermined by our ability to love ourselves. Similar to the airplane-crash-landing analogy, “Always put the mask on yourself before assisting someone who may be less capable,” we must put the Mask of Love on ourselves before loving someone who may or may not be capable of authentic love.

The irony is that we must first learn self-love to understand that egocentric love isn’t the healthiest way to love. We must first love our ego in order to transform it into an ego that isn’t just in love with itself. An ego that isn’t loved tends to become self-serving and egocentric (codependent or merely independent), but an ego that is loved tends to become self-actualized and soul-centric (interdependent).

An ego that has learned interdependence through self-love is more likely to love authentically. It is more likely to be vulnerable with another ego. And vulnerability is the key to loving greatly. It’s the secret of deep authenticity. A crucial aspect of self-actualized love, as opposed to egocentric love, is to allow ourselves to be vulnerable so that we may be astonished by love, taken aback by it, in awe of it. As the great Rumi once said, “Close your eyes. Fall in love. Stay there.”

The ability to let others love (freedom):

“The only way of loving a person is to love them without hope.” ~Walter Benjamin

Have you ever caught yourself saying this, regarding love and relationships? “I just don’t want to get hurt.” Or heard someone else say it? We hear people say this, and we nod in empathy, followed by an understanding pat on the back, or a sympathetic hug.

But, wait a minute! Who ever said getting hurt wasn’t a part of love? Are not pain and love two sides of the same coin? If we love something deeply enough, does it not hurt when we lose it? The thing is, the ability to love another person takes an enormous act of courage. And if we are genuinely allowing ourselves to love another person, then we must open ourselves up to the possibility of being hurt. This is what it means to be vulnerable. If we’re not “all in,” then what’s the point of trying?

Pain should not be avoided at the expense of love. Love should be embraced at the risk of pain. Indeed.

If we’ve already learned to love ourselves, which we should have taken care of before attempting to love another person anyway, then insecurities be damned! It’s time to go for it. It’s time to move all in. Rejection happens. But if we don’t at least give it a shot, and that means getting vulnerable and laying our insecurities out on the table like a bad hand of poker, then we’ll never know if it could have been something magical or not.

A relationship is actually two uniquely different people who have gone from being independent dancers to becoming an interdependent dance. This is the beauty of romantic, soul-centric love. It becomes a dance. But, and here’s the rub, the dance can only be enjoyable if both parties are free to dance… or not.

This is where it gets difficult: allowing our partner to love the way they need to love. This sounds simple enough, but it is deceivingly simple. Because we might not like the way they love. It requires good communication skills, brutal honesty, and an exemplary trust in the other dancer.

One of the biggest assumptions we make about love is imagining that the other person loves the same way that we do. In other words, we assume that what the other person means by love means the same thing that we mean by it. But this simply cannot be true if we are genuinely allowing the other person to be an individual with their own unique tastes and opinions.

Letting our lover love the way they need to love is just as much a part of the dance as our unique way of loving is. But we must be honest, first with ourselves and then with our partners. Sometimes this honesty will hurt, but pain is necessary for growth. And if a relationship is what we’re trying to grow, then pain is par for the course.

If the way another person loves doesn’t jive with the way that you love, then the dance either needs to end or it needs to take on a new form. If this sounds counter-intuitive, that’s because it is. As the great Victor Hugo cryptically stated, “Love is never stronger than when it is completely unreasonable.”

The ability to let love go (compersion):

“Everything we love is well-arranged dust.” ~Atticus

The ability to let love go is our ability to let go of our ego’s attachment to it.

Falling in love is both very easy and very difficult. It is easy when we are coming from a place of non-attachment and interdependence; when we’re allowing all things to mysteriously and majestically flow. But it is difficult when we are coming from a place of attachment and codependence, and we’re rigidly trying to control everything. It’s the difference between being Love, and vainly trying to pigeonhole love into the box of our expectation.

As Stephen Levine profoundly stated, “True love has no object. Many speak of their unconditional love for another. Unconditional love is the experience of being. You cannot unconditionally love someone. You can only be unconditional love. It is not a dualistic emotion. It is a sense of oneness with all that is. The experience of love arises when we surrender our separateness into the universal. It is a feeling of unity. You don’t love another, you are another.”

When we let love go, we’re not letting go of Love itself –not at all. We are letting go of the ego aspect of love. We’re letting go of the attachment, the need to cling. It’s not like we let go of love and then forget about it. No, it’s more like we are saying goodbye. Like proud parents who are sad that their child has left home, but are happy for their growth and open to the possibility of their return.

Love itself is never abandoned, nor is it forgotten. Only the needy, codependent, ego side of love that’s filled with unhealthy expectations and cultural predispositions about the way love should be is abandoned. Authentic love lasts forever, despite us, and even in spite of our egos. The more we let love go, the more we realize that we never owned it in the first place. It was never a thing that could be owned. It could only ever have been free, or it was never really love at all.

So, let’s learn to be Love in the face of expectation. Let’s be Love despite the love that thinks it needs validation. Let’s be Love even when others cannot. That is the heart of both compersion and forgiveness… Love, let others love, and then let go of your ego’s attachment to love. Do this, again and again, in a kind of loving life-death-rebirth process, and the ability of soul-centric, self-actualized love will not elude you.

Fuck Happiness! Forget Feeling Good and Focus on Being Better

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By Gary Z McGee

Source: The Mind Unleashed

“The difference between a good life and a bad life is how well you walk through the fire.” ~Carl Jung

Fuck positivity. Fuck feelings. Fuck trying to make yourself feel good all the time. Focus instead on becoming a better version of yourself. Focus on action. Better yet, be proactive. It’s less about feeling positive and more about positive action. Even then, it’s less about being great and more about being better. Indeed. There’s more happiness in a spoonful of hard-earned self-improvement than in an ocean-full of self-affirmations.

Positivity is the opposite of motivation:

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.” ~Edward Abbey

Here’s the thing: there’s nothing wrong with being happy. When you’re happy, be grateful. Soak it up. Absorb it. Balls to bones. Ovaries to marrow. But then let that shit go. Don’t remain in that state for too long or you’ll atrophy. You’ll stagnate. You’ll lose your focus. Other feelings and emotions have just as much to teach you (even more so, some might argue) as happiness does.

Everyone talks a big game about stretching their comfort zones, but when it really comes down to it most people remain in their comfortable, positive, warm, and happy comfort zones. We cling to them without even realizing it. We get so caught up in them that we lose sight of one of the most vital secrets of living finite lives in a seemingly infinite universe: take all things in moderation.

This includes, especially, positive emotions. Because positive emotions are more likely to hold you hostage than negative ones are. Whereas negative emotions are more likely to motivate you. I’m not saying be negative all the time. For negativity too should be taken in moderation. I’m saying use negative emotions to motivate you into positive action. Ask yourself: what’s more motivating “you’ve made it,” or “there’s no way you’ll make it.”

With “you’ve made it” there nothing more to do. There’s nowhere else to go. You’re done. You’re content. You’re comfort zone has reached its capacity. You’re stuck. You’ve succumbed to the Master’s Complex and forsaken Beginner’s Mind. With “there’s no way you’ll make it,”on the other hand, there’s a challenge. There’s an obstacle to overcome. There’s adventure to be had. You’re comfort zone has something to grow into and ultimately overcome. And then on to the next obstacle. As Shunryu Suzuki said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Besides, when it really comes down to it, there is no such thing as “you’ve made it.” As long as you’re alive there is still more life to live. As Richard Bach said, “Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.”

Forget feel-good platitudes, focus on “what can I learn from this?” instead:

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not —that one endures.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Ever heard the common cliché, “everything happens for a reason”? Well, fuck that shit! That’s just some sentimental placating bullshit people say to make them feel better about things happening.

Better to be honest with yourself. Better to get rid of the pacifying middleman with his pitiful reach-arounds and mawkish petting. Better to simply own up to the simple fact that shit happens. Good shit happens. Bad shit happens. Good shit happens to bad people. Bad shit happens to good people. Life is just one big shit show and some people get more shit than others.

Sometimes it really is just as simple as good/bad luck. Sometimes fate is out of our hands. And that’s okay. There’s more to being human than choice, there’s vicissitudes. There are unexpected changes that shit all over our choices. Things don’t happen for a reason. Things happen and then we give them a reason to ease our burden.

Which is fine if you wish to remain stuck in the safety of your comfort zone. But it’s disastrous if you wish to become a better, healthier version of yourself. Challenge all feel-good banalities with the self-empowering question: “What can I learn from this?” instead, and then watch as your comfort zone melts into your own progressive evolution.

Self-importance is a trap:

“Self-importance is a trap, because the moment we start to think that we actually matter is the moment when things start to go wrong. The truth is that you are supremely unimportant, and nothing matters. All of man’s striving is for nothing; all effort is wasted. To realize that everything is meaningless is tremendously liberating, since it then leaves us completely free to create our own lives and ignore the plans that others have for us.” ~Tom Hodgkinson

If self-importance is a trap, then self-improvement is the key to that trap. This is because the former is based on emotion and the latter is based on action. The former is lodged in positive emotion while the latter is engaged in positive action. Again, the action is the thing.

Feel-good emotions, positive affirmations, and idea’s like The Secret, only get you so far. They are akin to having a life jacket in turbulent water. Sure, your safe and secure from drowning. But without action, without swimming, that life jacket means fuck-all. If you don’t swim toward health and survival, you’re dead anyway. Appreciate the life jacket for what it is, but don’t just sit there glowing in your self-importance. Swim! Act! The positive act of swimming toward health, vitality, and survival, trumps the positive emotion of merely having a life jacket so that you don’t drown.

Same thing with happiness. It only gets you so far. Sometimes you just have to say fuck happiness. Fuck just floating here in a contented state. Fuck clinging to this safe and secure comfort zone that everyday constricts my becoming a better version of myself. This is the way comfort zones have been stretched since time immemorial. So swim! Courageously stretch your too-small comfort zone. Transform your life jacket into a life well lived.

The irony is that, in the long run, you’ll reap more happiness out of sowing a little painful and uncomfortable self-improvement than by remaining content in a state of “happy” and comfortable self-importance. And even if you don’t, at least you gave it a shot. At least you had the courage and the wherewithal to make your life better.

Transform negative emotions into positive action:

“Turn those negative emotions into action that will make you better instead of just feeling better about who you already are.” ~Elan Gale

It all comes down to this moment. Who are you right now? Sincerely ask yourself: do I want to improve myself or do I want to remain the same. There’s nothing inherently “wrong” with choosing either way. But there is something wrong with expecting self-improvement when you choose to remain the same. There is something wrong with expecting your comfort zone to miraculously stretch when you do absolutely nothing to encourage it to stretch. There issomething wrong with expecting your health to improve when you do fuck-all to help it improve.

This is where the rich minerals of negative emotion can be mined and harnessed to encourage the positive action needed to knock down the walls of reinforced positive emotions. If you honestly wish to remain the same, then, by all means, continue to bask in your contentedness and shower in your sentimental positive affirmations and armored happiness. There’s nobody to stop you. But if you really want to get down to brass tacks and utilize the positive action necessary to stretch your comfort zone and live life to the fullest, then tell yourself, “Fuck happiness (for now). It’s time to learn from my other emotions for a time.”

There is immense wisdom in sadness, anger, jealousy, and pain. Nearly all art was created by harnessing the vital power inherent in these sacred yet “negative” emotions. As Anais Nin surmised, “Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” And so it is also with the art of life. So it goes with attempting to bring balance and harmony to life. True happiness, Eudaimonia-type happiness, is more about transforming bad shit into fodder for good shit, than it is about relishing in mediocre shit and suppressing the bad shit.

Suppressing the bad shit just creates shitty demons that haunt us in our comfort zones anyway. Better not to create the demons in the first place. Or, if they’re already there (which they probably are), embrace them. Engage them. Go full-frontal, vulnerable beast-mode on them. Meet them on their turf, and then dare to transform them into your ally. Now that’stransforming demons into diamonds. That’s the epitome of transforming negative emotion into positive action.

So yeah, fuck happiness! Especially if it’s handicapping you from striving toward Eudaimonia. And especially-especially if you are using it as a sentimental placation or an excuse to remain stuck. A life well-lived cannot be lived inside a safe and secure, yet tiny and ignorant, comfort zone. No matter how happy you are there. It can only be lived by daring yourself to stretch it, again and again. Even if that means Pain, Sadness, and Grief have to drag you through the brambles. There’s adventure at hand. There are new horizons to stretch into. So fuck your positive emotions. Focus instead on transforming your negative emotions into positive action.

Blade Runner And The Synthetic Panopticon

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Truth Is Always An Open Question

By James Curcio

Source: Modern Mythology

This Is Only A Model

We are living in alternate realities. In one reality people see Trump’s incessant lying, and no one in power seeming to doing anything to stop it. Others see him as battling the deep state. Some see Brexit as a blind idiot kamikaze mission, while others see it as fighting back the evils of globalism. These are not equivalent claims, but they are both claims, narratives that claim to represent the way things are, and that’s what I’d like to examine here.

“All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails is a function of power and not truth.” — Nietzsche

Note that this aphorism doesn’t say “there is no truth,” nor does it question whether we all ultimately inhabit a single reality, only that whichever interpretation of the truth prevails is a function of power. Truth relies on an accurate or corresponding representation of reality. In this sense, we can talk of them singularly. But we only have our narratives and experiences with which to evaluate what that is.

And what is power? That demands at least an article in itself, but a popular 1984 quote lays the heart of what it’s purpose is: more of itself.

We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

This interpretation of social dynamics doesn’t contest the legitimacy of the scientific method, iteratively approaching closer approximations of truth (a model) distilled from reality, through experimentation. In fact, this premise was presented by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book, The Grand Design.

Model-dependent realism is a view of scientific inquiry that focuses on the role of scientific models of phenomena. It claims reality should be interpreted based upon these models, and where several models overlap in describing a particular subject, multiple, equally valid, realities exist. It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the “true reality” of a model as we can never be absolutely certain of anything. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model.

However, social dynamics aren’t exactly like physics, either. Not being able to recognize the difference between the ideal (an appeal for rationality, consistent methodology, and balance), vs. how people actually engage with interpreting it is a serious problem. And got to catch up. Fast.

In other words, the appeal for truth — whether CNN’s recent “this is an apple” advertisement, or Fox New’s old “fair and balanced” — itself enters into the marketplace of ideas. Or perhaps a more apt metaphor is a battlefield, especially when we consider the amount of capital, technology and labor that states, corporations, and billionaires can throw at furthering their personal agendas.

Cognitive biases, innate responses like tribalism, the myopia of fear, etc. are all being leveraged via media, all around us, all the time. This includes all forms of media, since it’s all digital narrative building of a collective sort. Myth making, even. That’s the real point, and it seems to be drowned out across the spectrum. We’re all too familiar now with the ideas of dis/information wars, but all of them are fundamentally a contest over who gets to define the narrative. If we recognize that this is fundamentally about power, do we also recognize that it operates on dynamics that have absolutely nothing to do with our dearly held moral values?

An assumption some may draw from this is that vested interests have distorted reality; therefore there is no reality. However, that obviously isn’t quite right, either. What obscures clear thinking on this is that reality essentially has two meanings: the “state of things as they are”, which makes no assurances of what that state is, and the question of if things exist at all. The first poses an epistemological framework, the latter, an ontological one.

The former we might consider the social-linguistic definition. That shouldn’t be conflated with the absolute existence of a thing. No, it can only speak to the identity and meaning that we apply to what we’re given.

The Hierarchy of Reality

This may seem like a tangent, but consider the Turing test:

The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. … If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

In other words, the appearance of sentience is all we ever get. An AI that behaves as if conscious is, from the outside, precisely the same as a conscious agent. If we appear to be having a conversation, then so we are. But does that prove we’re real in some definitive sense? No. Again, we are being presented with the social-linguistic layer of reality, that speaks to perceptions.

The relevance here to society is to be found within Blade Runner, which of course takes a great deal of inspiration in its core mythos from the problems posed by the Turing test. The world presented there is a hierarchy of power based on perceived degree of reality.

There is, within this, the implications of Benthamite Utilitarianism, and Foucault’s later elaboration on those ideas: that we may consider the world based on externalities that are socially determined rather than based on our internal experience. This seems in some sense precisely the opposite of “lived experience,” which seeks to situate our internal experience as the center of our concerns.

This directly enters into Blade Runner 2049, for instance, Joi, who seems the lowest on the hierarchy of reality, is seen as a pure surface, and all but K seem to question whether she has any lived experience at all. Mariette observes to K, “Oh I see, you don’t like real girls,” and later to Joi, “I‘ve been inside you. Not so much there as you think.”

Of course, this question is always open, one must always be judged “sufficiently real.”

Another example of this dilemma can be found in a current medical crisis. As many Americans know, we have something of an opiate epidemic in the United States. Although there is no end of debate over why this is the case, for doctors concerned about liability and patients concerned about being in pain for the rest of their lives, much of the politics boils away.

The problem comes down to the nature of pain itself. We may exhibit external signs of pain, but some patients will present with those more or less, for various cultural, personal, and even biological reasons. So the appearance of pain or lack of it is little use, when trying to determine whether a patient is “drug seeking.” Even if we test the biological response of different patients who are experiencing pain, we find that it is very difficult to tell. This is especially true with those who experience chronic pain. For instance, blood pressure often rises when you’re in pain, but higher blood pressure isn’t proof, and one must also ask what the baseline is. All of this calls to mind the lie-detector style tests used in the first Blade Runner movie to assess the reality of the subject, from the outside in.

Patient reporting was seen as the golden standard for pain level diagnosis during the years that doctors were ostensibly over-prescribing. But this too is no better than asking a Replicant whether they’re “real” or not. What we’re left with is a dependence on trust of people’s own stories about their lived experience, but of course, people can also lie. It comes down to a matter of faith and trust, and those are commonly in short supply.

This outside-in valuation is also the basis for what has recently come to be called — with some contention — neoliberal capitalism.

… it [Utilitarianism] presupposes a very concrete theory of nature as well as human nature: an understanding of human beings not as unique, irreplaceable beings — as neighbors, friends, or members of a community oriented toward justice and fairness — but rather as nameless, faceless, calculating, hedonistic, atomistic units. Alongside of this it understands nature and the natural world of plants, animals, trees, oceans and mountains not as intrinsic goods in themselves, but merely as ‘things’ that have only human use-value.

This gives us a clue to understanding why utilitarianism is so attractive to a modern bureaucratized, consumerist culture that is prepared to uphold profit maximization over human health, environmental safety, clean water and nutritious food. In other words, utilitarianism is widely embraced precisely because it replaces the living, breathing, emotional and experiencing human being with the human as pleasure or profit maximizing machine; it prizes the quick technical fix over the difficult task of understanding the human condition; it valorizes thoughtless calculation over thoughtful ethical discernment and practical wisdom. — CounterPunch

So Blade Runner presents an acceleration of the myths many of us already apply to the world around us, one which is deeply suspicious of our ability to find singular truth, or maybe more aptly, to avoid inflicting our power fantasies, needs and fears upon one another, forever.

The Authority of Authorship

When we engage with narratives online, in the press, in the media, we need to remain constantly aware that it is presenting a view of the world, and it is a view which in many ways is likely to be self-serving. There is, at the same time, an invisible architecture at work underneath the ways the world is re-presented to us, and this composes one of the fundamental anxieties that Baudrillard presented in Simulacra and Simulation. We cannot always discern even our own motives, or the reasons why we feel that one thing is more true than another when truly sufficient evidence has not been provided. Because interpretations of truth are malleable. And there has never been a mass-surveillance, mass-behavioral and linguistic analysis machine like the Internet.

It is easy for us to apply this sort of cynicism towards our presumptive ideological enemies, but will always remain more difficult to apply that same consideration to narratives that immediately go, “ah, this seems true!” Again, truth is always a claim, which must be proven — and never finally.

All authority that seeks to stop this process and say “put no others before me” are plays at power. Even within our own minds and hearts this is true.

We mustn’t forget that.

Why Chaos Always Seems To Have Such Grand Potential

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tahrir

By Shauna Janz

Source: Collective Evolution

We have been experiencing “chaos as grand potential” throughout our entire history. From the first potential of life that exploded from the stars and hurled across a universe in chaotic fashion, to the evolution of all species on our Earth, to the splitting of cells that form life in a mother’s womb.

Growth and evolution emerge from chaos.

Another way of thinking about chaos is the process of positive disintegration – originally used in psychology by Kazimierz Dąbrowski, who viewed tension and anxiety as a necessary part of any personal growth process. This term has also been used by Joanna Macy to describe how living systems evolve; when continued feedback tells a system that it has become dysfunctional, the system responds by changing.

In other words, when old ways of doing things are no longer adaptive or effective, we are catapulted into a disintegration process, or chaos, so that new ways of doing things can emerge that are positive for a sustainable life.

Chaos is a necessary part of the process any living system, individual, or community goes through to adapt, evolve, and remain sustainable in their environment.

For people, that environment may be our own personal body/mind, our families, our workplace, our society, or our collective global community.

From the chaos, or disintegration, comes the grand potential for something wholly new to arise – something that surpasses the old way of being and has become a more inclusive and integrated way of being.

I am reminded of Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart, dedicated to finding hope when we are suffering from change or loss; when we are in the midst of disintegration. Through her soothing words, she assists her readers to remain open and aware through the confusion and anxiety of chaos.

Pain and grief often inhabit the space of chaos. As familiar ways prove no longer useful, we are thrust into a space of unknowing and chaos before new ways can fully develop.

I reflect on the grief I have experienced in my own life, and on the grief in others that I have witnessed and supported. When loss and change erupt in our lives, we are left in the emotional wake to re-create who it is we are in our changed world.

We are left to find a new way to make meaning and to find adaptive strategies to live on and continue to thrive. It may mean letting go of certain roles or identities, or it may mean embracing new ones and honouring the process.

This doesn’t happen overnight. Before new ways emerge, we are left in confusion. We are left in anxiety. We are left in pain and grief.

In this chaotic space we may feel fearful, uncertain, and out of control. We may react and grasp for anything that might give us a sense of comfort or control, or allow us to numb out from feeling at all.

We see this on a personal scale as well as on a global scale – whether grasping for escape through another drink, Netflix series, or new pair of shoes, or whether grasping for control through declaring another war or engaging in oppressive acts against others.

Positive disintegration can only happen if we stay aware, open, and conscious to see the potential that lies within the chaos, and to then act to create new ways that are sustainable.

If we learn to navigate our own personal grief and chaos in conscious ways remaining calm, open, and trusting, then we gain the ability to navigate the grief and chaos in our world in the same way.

Remaining conscious and open is absolutely necessary because globally we are in the midst of a significant disintegration process, and we need to change how we live.

We know that the capitalist industrial growth complex that currently defines our global economics and social systems has become dysfunctional. We are witnessing extreme abuses of power, violence. and tactics of separation – all rooted in fear and grasping for control.

We are all experiencing the impacts of this global chaotic time – grief, anxiety, uncertainty. We are also witnessing efforts to make changes for a sustainable and equitable future.

Joanna Macy calls this time “The Great Turning.” In her book Coming Back to Life – Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World she exemplifies many of the ways we are seeing the process of positive disintegration carry out in our world.

From direct action and legislative work to slow down the process of environmental and social destruction, to academics and grassroot groups working to educate about the impacts of our capitalist industrial system, to the cognitive revolutions and spiritual awakenings that deeply shift our consciousness toward a sustainable way of being on this Earth — we have the ability to stand strong in the winds of chaos, to choose openness and compassion, to hold fast to our vision of a vibrant and sustainable future, and to act in loving ways, now.

We are seeing new forms of sustainable practices emerge, witnessing the resurgence of ancestral ways of knowing, and experiencing shifts of consciousness.

There is no one person that will save our planet or human family. It takes the whole global community to respond, which means it takes each and every one of us to step forward in our own ways to shine our light and hold hope, trust, and compassion through this time of chaos.

Each one of us has a gift – has words to share, actions to motivate, art to show, or ways of being that exude love, trust and connection.

There is a place for everyone – whether it is the frontlines of direct action and resistance, raising conscious and compassionate children, or actively healing your own wounds – these all contribute to the healing of our world.

Joanna Macy says, you cannot “fix” the world, but you can take part in its self-healing. Healing wounded relationships within you and between you is integral to the healing of our world.

Each one of us who chooses love over fear, feeling over numbing, and compassionate action over apathy, contributes to the emergence of a sustainable new way of being in our world.

I invite you to reflect on the ways you are responding in your own life to a global future of love and sustainability. What are the gifts you bring to this world? How are you actively living your gifts every day?

And I thank you for remaining open and compassionate amidst this time of chaos as grand potential.

8 Simple Steps to Forgive Even the Unforgivable

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Cats And Dogs Hugging

By Christina Sarich

Source: Yoga for the New World

Are you feeling resentment? Pain? Anguish? Perhaps even fury? It doesn’t matter if your emotions are directed at the general idiocy of a government that seems bought-out by an elitist class, or a close friend or family member. It doesn’t matter if you are raging at a complete stranger on the road, in a moment that dissipates fairly quickly, or if you are dealing with years of abuse or emotional torment. Forgiveness is a spiritual act that requires us to see things differently than we do now.

It doesn’t seem to be so when we are thinking of the wrong another has done to us, or the hurt they’ve so carelessly lavished, but forgiveness can free us from even the most unforgivable acts. Many of us hold onto our anger in hopes that this emotion will somehow anchor in some Universal Justice – as if our teeth gritting, and brow furrowing can somehow balance the teetering scales of righteousness in the world.

Sadly, the act or words of another that we keep running in our minds is like emotional cement, keeping us stuck and unable to move into peace. Our unforgiveness often doesn’t even affect the ‘other’ as much as it does us. There is a Tibetan Buddhist story about two monks who encounter each other many years after being released from prison where they had been horribly tortured by their captors. “Have you forgiven them?” asks the first. “I will never forgive them! Never!” replies the second. “Well, I guess they still have you in prison, don’t they?” the first says.

Many mistakenly believe that forgiveness somehow absolves another from their wrong-doing. That in forgiving, we helplessly accept, give up, surrender to defeat – that we are helpless. The exact opposite is true. When we face a terrible wrong, and look within to see how we can prevent the same incident from happening again, then we are truly on the correct spiritual path.

Dr. Fred Luskin is the Director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects. He has led the largest research project to date to study the effects of forgiveness on hurt individuals. He has dealt with people suffering from a huge range of things needing to be forgiven – from a romantic break up to the murder of a child. He believes that there are specific steps one can take to reduce the stress that comes with holding onto hurt, and make the progress of forgiveness as easy as possible. I tend to agree. Forgiveness usually takes a little time, but it needn’t consume your life for years. You can start with these eight steps to move your heart into the right place, and begin to forgive:

  1. We are often afraid to truly articulate just how much we have been wronged, but we must. In cases that are more obvious – such as losing a family member in a war-torn country to the hands of an unfeeling mercenary – it is easier to explain how angry and sad we are, but in other cases, such as with long-term familial abuse, we may have even come to think the behaviors we were subjected to were ‘normal,’ and only later do we realize how much pain and hurt we stuffed down over the years in order to function within our family unit. When that pain is realized, it is helpful to articulate it to a counselor or a few close friends. Keeping those emotions locked inside does not permit the process of forgiveness to begin.
  1. Forgiveness is a personal journey. You do it for yourself, not for the person you think needs to be forgiven, or anyone else. Once you make a commitment to do whatever it takes to let go of the pain and feel better – and do it for you, then forgiveness starts to become an easier endeavor. When you feel better about yourself, after all, you will find it more difficult to hold grudges against others. When needed practice self-care and self-love. If you are still involved with the person or people who you are trying to forgive, you can simply explain to them that you need time to care for yourself. If this is not appropriate due to the ongoing behavior of another, then simply practice uncompromising self-love and distance yourself from the other person until your feelings of anger and hatred dissipate. Reconciliation may be possible in the future.
  1. While reconciliation is at times possible, sometimes it just isn’t. If someone is emotionally unstable, and will likely continue to act in hurtful or harmful ways, we don’t need to be physically or emotionally near them to forgive them. What you’re after is internal peace. Forgiveness can be defined as the peace and understanding that comes from dropping the blame for whoever has hurt you – changing your never-ending story of grievance, and realizing that they were possibly playing a role in the grand play of life – called maya – to help you learn more about yourself. It doesn’t mean that murdering your child is right, or that stealing, cheating, emotional abuse, or other ‘wrongs’ are ‘right.’ It simply means that you choose to see that person’s pain as the impetus for their own actions, and not as a personal affront to you. Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t forgive without loving. And I don’t mean sentimentality. I don’t mean mush. I mean having enough courage to stand up and say, ‘I forgive, I’m done with it.’” If someone has been narcissistic, selfish, hateful, or jealous, you can forgive them for your own peace of mind, and allow them to learn from the Universal lessons, which are surely coming their way, to help them forgive those who hurt them also. While you don’t have to reconcile with others who are not ready to do this spiritual work for themselves, you do have to reconcile your own emotions.
  1. Believe it or not your hurt is coming from what you feel now, not what happened ten minutes ago, an hour ago, days ago, or even ten years ago. That old adage about time healing all wounds is true, but this is because we tend to get caught in karmic cycles that cause us to mentally recycle pain instead of letting it go. In the book Karma and Reincarnation Transcending Your Past, Transforming Your Future, Elizabeth Clare Prophet and Patricia R. Spadaro explain that while “karma means accountability and payback, reincarnation is simply another word for opportunity.” Karmic retribution is not punishment, but the benevolent Universe’s way of allowing us free will. It does mean, however, that what we do unto others, will be done unto us, somehow, at some time, in some way. The Sioux holy man, Black Elk, has explained that even nature comes full circle, and Voltaire espoused the fact that “it is not more surprising to be born twice, than once; everything in nature is resurrection. The cycles of karma and reincarnation can help us to understand family patterns, community patterns, and even wider societal patterns that need undoing. When we stay stuck in thoughts of the pain another has caused us, we miss the opportunity of this incarnation. After talking about a hurt with another person, and expressing it fully, it is time to start letting it go, and looking at the patterns which we created it. This is the true gift of being ‘hurt’ be another – it is really a chance to see how we have hurt ourselves.

I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing . . . I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given to me. ~ Carl Jung

  1. Stop your fight or flight response. When we start to ruminate about what another has done to us, our hypothalamus gets in gear, engaging both the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal-cortical system. When the effect of these two systems goes ‘online’ the fight or flight response begins – this means we are in moderate to full-blown fear mode. We are afraid this will happen to us again. We are feeling the incident as if it were happening right now, no matter now long ago it occurred. Our heart rates and blood pressure rise. We might even sweat a little. Our bodies are flooded with 30 different stress hormones and it can make ‘forgiving’ very difficult. By instead practicing a simple, calming mantra meditation, a few yoga asanas, yoga nidra, nadi shodhana, or going for a short walk outdoors, we can reverse this fight-or-flight response, and deal with the fear behind our pain from a more level emotional state.
  1. Give up your expectations of others – Dr. Luskin calls this ‘recognizing the unenforceable rules.’ In other words, you can’t expect to get from others, what they have no ability or desire to give you. While we can practice love without expectation, we also should be aware that others aren’t always capable of loving back. If your inner child is still bemoaning the inability of an emotionally shutdown father to be affectionate and caring, or you expect a selfish boss to behave differently, then you are setting yourself up for more pain, and often. Realize that what you seek from others – kindness, love, affection, support – will come from those willing and able to give it, and the more you offer it to yourself, the more likely these individuals will come into your orbit. Just let the others, who are not ready to act as evolved, be. No resentment – that’s just where they are at in their cycle or karma and reincarnation.
  1. Know that a life well lived is your best revenge – as long as you stay hurt and angry, you are feeding the ego of the person who felt the need to hurt you. You give that person power over you – you are still in ‘prison’ like the two monks said. Find personal power in the good things in your life. Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough are two of the leading American investigators of gratitude. They describe gratitude as personality strength—the ability to be keenly aware of the good things that happen to you and never take them for granted. Grateful individuals express their thanks and appreciation to others in a heartfelt way, not just to be polite. If you possess a high level of gratitude, you often feel an emotional sense of wonder, thankfulness and appreciation for life itself. Start a gratitude journal, or simply practice a few moments of quiet contemplation realizing all you do have now, instead of getting stuck on your hurt feelings. Counting your blessings is not only good for your health, but it helps to dissipate sadness, anger, and frustration.
  1. Change your ‘story’ – Instead of telling a story to yourself and others about how you were done wrong, decide to rewrite the script. You can, instead of being a victim, decide to use the experience as a way to heal others, and practice one of the most profound spiritual practices ever taught. Imagine the ripples that the pebbles of forgiveness could send out into the world. I give the example of a man named Robert Rule to explain exactly how profound changing your story can be:

“Gary Leon Ridgway is better known as the infamous Green River Killer. In 2003, he confessed to the murders of 48 women. In 2011, Ridgway was convicted of the murder of Rebecca Marrero, bringing the victim count up to 49. By his own confession, he may have murdered as many as 60 women. Ridgway especially despised prostitutes and targeted them for his killings. At Ridgway’s 2003 sentencing, the families of the victims had the opportunity to speak out and address Ridgway directly. Understandably, many were angry and lashed out at Ridgway for the unimaginable grief he had put them through. As Ridgway stonily listened to the family members express their grief and anger, one person came up and said something unexpected. When the time came for Robert Rule, the father of teenage victim Linda Jane Rule, to speak, Ridgway finally showed a glimpse of remorse. Rule’s words to Ridgway were: “Mr. Ridgway . . . there are people here that hate you. I’m not one of them. You’ve made it difficult to live up to what I believe, and that is what God says to do, and that’s to forgive. You are forgiven, sir.” These words brought Ridgway to tears.”

About the Author

Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and *See the Big Picture*. Her blog is Yoga for the New World . Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing The Body And Mind Through The Art Of Yoga. Please reprint this article with attribution bio and all links in tact.