The (Covered?) Canvas of This Moment

How are you?

To answer that question, we usually look to the past or the future:

What's been happening in life and how do I feel about it? What's going to happen in life and how do I feel about it?

We take the question as an invitation to reflect on our life and our experience of our life  - and then judge it. 

The past-based answer to the question is based on what has already happened - and how we judge it.

How well we slept, whether we voted for the person who won, how our students are performing in class, whether our kids and spouse are sick. All in the past, and weighted with our judgments. 

There's the past, and then there's our judgments about the past. We mostly live in our judgments about the past (good or bad).

The future-based answer to the question is based on what might happen, what we expect will happen, what we fear will happen, what we hope will happen. We stand on the edge of this moment, look out over the illusory landscape of the future, and judge it. Is it a good outlook, or is it a bad outlook?

Most of our life is spent in this realm of judgment - assessing and evaluating everything we see, hear, feel, and consider. We're living in a vision of the past or a vision of the future in our own minds, and we're judging the present moment based on how it all looks in our heads.

It’s as if the canvas of our consciousness is simply cluttered with all those stories, perspectives, and judgments:

They're not all bad judgments! Some of them are pretty great judgments. (The great ones are still judgments.)

This is what many of us love about babies and little kids. Their canvas is still clear, open, empty. It's also what many of us strive for in meditation, prayer, exercise, seminars, and coaching, a blank canvas:

As we grow up, our families, friends, teachers, religions, cultures, and societies splash paint onto our canvas. Since we’re just kids, we figure they’re right! So we let that paint hangout and dry right where it was splashed.

Middle school and high school are like firehouses of meaning, significance, and judgment shot upon our canvas!

Over time and through embarrassment, shame, and trauma, we begin to run out of room to consciously create on this canvas for ourselves. (Or so it seems anyway.)

And then there are moments of inspiration: Wait! I can erase parts of this canvas! I can create something new!

But it isn’t baked into our education system how to actually clear our canvas consistently and effectively, and those moments of inspiration become fewer and fewer, and we may relate to them more hopelessly and apathetically. 

This is the critical gap in our education system. We are creators throughout our lives, but most of us never learn the truth about this inherent ability. Nor do most of us ever learn the way to gently clear the gunk off our canvas, the gunk of spray and spit from someone else’s emotional outburst or our own fears.

We are constantly creating. It’s just mostly unconscious. 

Moment by moment, we repaint the canvas of our consciousness with declarations and judgments from the past and tired fears of the future. Then we confuse our own repainting of the past with “the truth about the way things are.”

To the point when even getting asked “How are you?” we don’t look at the moment before us, we instead look at that cluttered canvas and report on our judgments of the circumstances of our lives.

Something else is possible, and one access to it is Mind Mastery.

Much Love. ❤️

Election Anxiety Isn't About the Election

Election season - where our judgments, grievances, and fears go on loudspeaker.

We think that partisanship and divisiveness is out there somewhere, in our political system, in the words and behaviors of others, in the devil's candidate of the other political party. 

The divisiveness is right here, forged in our own fearful and judgmental hearts.

It's called a racket - a dishonest scheme. We blame politics for the divisiveness, we blame our political enemies for our fears, and we see ourselves as the victims! And from our victimhood, we justify being judgmental, righteous, and fearful.

It’s such a classic case of tribalism, where we dehumanize others and see ourselves, our values, and the things we care about as victims to these nefarious or ignorant others.

Our fears are valid.

The solution to them, however, isn’t to blast them on loudspeaker.

The solution also isn’t to suppress those fears through anger and frustration projected out there at the enemy.

The real source of our turmoil during election season is the holding, cultivating, and festering of grievances. Our turmoil is an inside job.

Just because other people on our side of the political divide share our fears doesn’t make our fears okay to react and live from. 

Just because we’re angry doesn’t mean we’re right. It also doesn't mean we have to express that anger. 

This too: just because our candidate loses doesn’t mean all hope is lost. 

What if it’s true what Gandhi said: 

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

What if it’s true that our inner turmoil, even if shared by the half of the country who agrees with us, is an opportunity to change ourselves and who we be so that the tendencies in the world would also change?

Lord knows our candidate winning this election doesn’t actually resolve anything political long-term. We’ll be back in this game in 4 years, won't we? 

"Well there won't be the devil of a Trump or Harris in 4 years!" you might say. No, but there will remain the devil within ourselves who so easily hates other people to whom we don't even offer the smallest effort of understanding before judging them.

What if the real problem here isn't an external problem but an internal one?

What if the change we're really looking to create in the world isn't sufficiently solved by our one vote and a bunch of negative emotional energy?

Choose: Love or Hate. Peace or Fear. Trust or Anxiousness. 

Regardless who wins the election, we've all still got work to do.

That work starts right here, with you and me, and how we show up every single moment of our lives. How we show up for ourselves and how we show up for others.

Fear, anger, and frustration are an inside job. Let's stop projecting that mess outside ourselves.

From Jesus:

Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye?

How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye?

You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.

Let's stop projecting our hatred out there on the political other and realign our being and actions with who we expect all others to be: compassionate, loving, peaceful, generous, forgiving, and supportive.

“[Be] unto others as you would have them [be] unto you.”

The inside job of healing our own emotional wounds is much more likely to heal our national divisiveness and polarization than any amount of name-calling, frustration, anger, fear, or anxiousness.

If you want support in this self-healing endeavor, reach out and let's talk. No matter who wins tomorrow's election, neither will have the power to heal this part of us.

Much Love. ❤️

Wounds (and the Inside Job of Happiness)

My client conversation one afternoon last week was with a 20-year-old man grappling with academic and life decisions, stress, and fear.

The next morning, I met with a 65+ client leveling up her professional performance and personal experience: her honoring of self and other, her love of self and other, and her relationships.

The common thread between these two very different people is their humanity: each and every one of us experienced traumas (Greek for 'wound' or 'hurt') at a very young age, and much of how we show up in the rest of our lives is in reaction to some perceived deficiency in ourselves.

"Whether we recognize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world." - Dr. Gabor Maté

It's a perceived deficiency, pressed into our bodies, our cells, our organs, our hearts, and our minds. When we get that we're not actually deficient, something else becomes possible.

We seek acknowledgment, acceptance, love, admiration, and validation from others in thousands of ways to somehow prove to ourselves: Yes, I'm lovable, I'm enough, I'm safe, I'm not alone.

And in the very next moment after getting evidence that we're lovable, that we're enough, that we're not really alone, we begin seeking more evidence for it, to answer the seemingly perpetual and truly unanswerable questions:

"Do you love me?"

"Am I enough?"

"Am I doing this right?"

"Am I safe?"

"Am I okay?"

And no set of circumstances will ever satisfy those lines of questioning, because the future is always an unknown.

So those questions pop back up again and again, and we go back at it, seeking approval, validation, safety, again and again, in relationship upon relationship, job upon job, year upon year.

Happiness, like fear, is an inside job. It simply can't be built solely on circumstances, especially the elusive yet ever-sought perfect circumstances, the holy grail of human craving, at best a house of cards built upon any instability of our own inner life.

The healing of personal and generational trauma begins right here, right now, with the person seeing with your eyes. As I heal mine and you heal yours, the past is healed and forgiven, and the future is given its best chance to thrive.

It's no one else's responsibility than our own, because this important healing is an inside job.

Much Love. ❤️