A Revolutionary Perspective

Each of us has an innate capacity for insight and well-being. At our core, we are inherently whole, wise, perfect, untarnishable, and unbreakable. We all have immediate access to peace of mind, enjoyment, and effectiveness.

There’s a good chance you think those assertions are a pile of bull crap. It sounds nice, and wouldn’t it be great if it were accurate, but it’s simply not true. It’s some kind of positive-thinking or escapist hopefulness that doesn’t reflect our actual experience.

Maybe it could be true if you hadn’t made the choices you’ve made, had the family you had, went to the school you attended, had that thing happen to you, had that other thing happen to you, or seen that other thing happen to someone else. But those words certainly don’t apply to anyone in the real world except maybe babies.

Well those words are true for each of us. So why don’t we feel it, and why don’t we see it more easily?

We've been trained to think otherwise. We’ve been conditioned to view ourselves, others, the world, and life itself as an unending engagement with circumstances that challenge us and then define us. X happens and we respond in Y way. X happens and it means Y about us, others, or life. It’s inevitable that this is how we work, and we’ve turned out this way because of our past experiences.

Ridiculous things happen to us, and so much of it really is outrageous! I am so angry that they did that! That must be so upsetting for you! Poor us! The world is against us, and it’s taking everything we’ve got not to crumble under the weight of it all. All we can do is resist the forces of evil trying to drag us down. The best we can do is turn our victimhood into empowerment to persecute the true perpetrators!

That’s all a bit extreme, but not too far off the mark for many of us. Circumstances happen to us, and the best we can seem to do is survive them. In any conflict or perceived conflict, we shift among the three roles of the drama triangle, and that’s just how it is.

So yes, those words don't feel real to us because we've been conditioned to see life a different way.

Another reason we don’t experience ourselves as the free, divine, and enlightened beings we already are is that it would mean that we really are solely responsible for our experience of life.

If I acknowledge that I am inherently well, then I can’t blame another for my lack of wellness. I can’t blame another for my frustrations. I can’t blame my past for my current shortcomings. I can’t blame myself or my family or society or substances or even my own thinking for my seeming inability to be well. I can’t resign myself to a future of “more of the same.”

Some of us don’t blame others as much as we blame ourselves. Some of us have an intuitive sense that only we are to blame for our tough experience of life. We might realize that we can’t point our finger out there and blame anyone else because only we are to blame.

But that’s more of the same!

I’m not suggesting that being responsible means that we take on blame for all of our challenges and suffering. I’m actually suggesting that there’s no one to blame. Blame itself is a way to avoid being responsible, and blame itself is part of what keeps us feeling down.

I’m suggesting, instead, that there’s always an opportunity to take radical responsibility for our experience, our actions, and our results.

This is why the question that always delivers continues to be the most powerful question I can ask myself or another. It’s a reminder that we’ve always got agency. Here are the three forms of the question that I like to use:

• What am I avoiding being responsible for?

• What can I be responsible for?

• What do I really want?

The idea that we are innately well and perfect is revolutionary. Not only does it take courage to see it, but it takes trust and a willingness to be vulnerable. It’s been said by our favorite sages for thousands of years - look around, look within, and wake up to heaven and the God that’s already among us - and we sort of believe them, but not really.

Participating in this conversation helps us shake loose our conditioned thinking that there’s anything innately wrong. There’s not anything wrong, and transforming our experience doesn’t need to be hard, take a lot of “work,” or exist as a possibility for only some of us. If you're human, it applies to you.

Conversations, trainings, coaching, and exploring are all ways to awaken to this truth about ourselves. Our conditioned pathways of thinking will disagree, but our deeper knowing will get the cosmic point.

"Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be." - James Baldwin

Thanks so much for engaging with my work. ❤️

Obscured by Demons

I’ve written before that our perceptions are a version of reality that’s filtered through thought. This is simply a fact or a principle underlying human experience. Here’s a diagram to illustrate it that I’ve shared before:

Thought is one of humanity’s greatest assets. It’s led to our survival, it’s led to our thriving, and it’s one of the strongest outlets of our creative genius.

Thought is also the source of most of our demons. Shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, regret, nightmares, and addiction. Each of those is infused with thought. There’s also a physiological component to these demons, but our physiological reactions and responses are typically guided by our thinking. (I don’t mean to diminish the impact of pain and abuse here - those are a different type of demon.)

Take the stick that looks like a snake. When we’re hiking in the woods and catch a snake shape out of the corner of our eye, we jump back, our heart rate quickens, and our body tenses. We thought the stick was a snake, and all of these physical reactions ensue. The same is true of our demons. Through the filter of thought, we perceive something about others, about ourselves, or about life itself, and we think it’s a snake.

A friend of mine refers to our demons as our shadow side. In our men’s group, he wanted us to do more “shadow work.” Shadows, however, are just blocked light. For example, shadows from trees happen when a tree blocks the light of the sun.

Our demons, our shadows, arise when we allow our thinking to eclipse the light of an authentic experience of ourselves and our lives. In other words, our darkest moments are when the thought filter is so thick that we don't see the light that’s always there.

Even when we’re not in the throes of battling our demons, our view of life is obscured by the thinking of our mood. When our mood is low (a bad mood), our thought filter is thicker. When our mood is high (a good mood), our thought filter is thinner.

So what’s our access to freedom? How do we loosen our demons’ grip on us? How do we get access to love even when we’re in a low mood?

Step 1: Trust We are innately well, inherently wise and perfect, and life is a gift and a phenomenal experience. Our thinking will not often let us see ourselves and others this way, but it’s true. Especially in a low mood, our thinking shows us versions of ourselves and others quite far from the truth. Until we trust that this is the case, we’ll keep trying to solve our problems with more thinking.

Step 2: Ride it out More thinking in a low mood doesn’t clear the waters, it keeps them cloudy. Ride the low mood out without acting from that low mood's thinking. Redirect your attention away from your thinking. Then do it again. And again. When lake water is cloudy, you can’t force the mud back down to the bottom; you’ve got to wait it out and the water will clear on its own. Same is true with your thinking: more thinking from a low mood will just keep swirling the waters. Yes, this depends on trust that your system will right itself, the storm will end, and the waters will clear. Trust it.

Step 3: Foster good feelings There are simple things we can do in any moment to foster a feeling of well-being. It doesn’t take meditating in silence for decades, and it doesn’t take perfect physical health. Get grounded. Practice getting grounded. It’s a physiological and mental practice, and getting grounded also brings a feeling of well-being. Practice this in high moods as well as low moods. Practice it in the middle moods. Fostering this feeling of well-being evens out the dark moments and gives us physical and psychological anchors in those moments when the turbulence is high and the mood is low.

Thanks so much for reading. ❤️

“You’ve seen my descent, now watch my rising.” - Rumi

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All of the diagrams above, particularly the mood diagram, are inspired by diagrams Joe Bailey shares in The Serenity Principle. I'm grateful to my friend Pete for turning me onto Joe's work.

Adulthood Isn't an Age

Yes, all those other parents were right: kids grow up too fast. I look at these two middle schoolers that we’ve got at home and I can barely get over how big and mature they’re getting. Facebook’s memories remind me so often of when these big guys were just little guys, and it moves me every single time. My little boys are growing up, and they’re growing up too fast.

Yet, we all sort of know that getting older isn’t the same as growing up. Those countless times that my older siblings told me to “grow up” and stop annoying them wasn’t them asking me to get bigger and get older; they wanted me to act more maturely.

Our societal rite of passage into adulthood is graduating high school and turning the legal age of 18. There may be other familial, religious, or biological rites of passage too (such as taking care of younger siblings, bat mitzvah, and menstruation), but most of us tend to agree that 18 is when we become an adult.

Biologically, we’re ready for reproduction in early adolescence. Neurologically, we’re not fully grown until 24-28 years old. Emotionally and spiritually, many of us don’t ever seem to make it to adulthood.

Until 25 years old or so, our lives are in rapid transition. We change by the month or by the year at the longest. Then, when we finally are adults in a neuro-biological sense around 25, we still experience so many transitions, changes in life status as well as biology. The changes seem to be more subtle beyond age 25, but they’re certainly there (I'm in the midst of a mid-life transition myself).

I think our culture is making a mistake by thinking of adulthood as beginning at a specific age. There's nothing wrong with making this mistake, but there is a missed opportunity. I prefer to think of adulthood as a way of being, an approach, or an experience.

How many of us have lost someone close to us from alcohol or drugs, or watched someone’s life wither in the face of addiction of any kind? How many more of us experience general struggle, stress, and anxiety as we grapple with life’s responsibilities and our own well-being? Then there’s the sense that there’s something more to this life, something just beyond where we are but we can’t quite seem to get there or tap into it.

Add to that our vastly larger shared challenges like social disruption and inequality, environmental degradation, large-scale extinction, and a consumerism that doesn’t satiate our desires yet carries an often unseen wake of negative environmental and social impact.

I don’t write this to catastrophize or try to scare you into caring about what I care about. I’m just being honest about the facts. We face our own individual challenges, we face local and regional challenges, we face national challenges, and we face global challenges. And we face them without a consistent level of awareness, accountability, and realization of our own innate capacities to creatively solve problems and live life in wellness.

The promise of adulthood is realized capacities for well-being, satisfaction, enjoyment, appreciation, community, love, and effectiveness. We, our loved ones, the human race, and the planet are crying to be well. And we’ve all got the capacity for it - we always have and always will.

Whether we know how to tap into it is a different question. There are consistent, effective ways to tap into it, and that's the game I want schools playing.

I propose that we add to the high school foundation of knowledge a foundation of awareness: an awareness of the self as an agent in creating, fostering, and transforming our experience of life; an awareness of the self as innately capable, free, and desirous of living a life of well-being; an awareness of the self as part of a community in fostering well-being in others and our environment.

To me, the real definition of adulthood is fully realizing our response-ability - the capacity to creatively respond to any circumstances without constraint. We all have that capacity built into us as humans; most of us just haven’t learned yet how to effectively and consistently tap into it.

Let’s change that.

Thanks so much for engaging with my work. ❤️