Losing the Video Game, Winning Myself

This is my 300th post on this blog! 4 years and 10 months. More than 600 hours of writing.

Thank you for reading it. ❤️

Tonight, I could write post upon post about the depth of truth and wisdom heard in each conversation with a client, each intentional conversation with a friend or student, and each moment of conscious living in my life. I could write about the beauty and the grace and the miracle it is to be alive at all, let alone in an age of such luxury for more of humanity than has ever been true before.

And yet inspiration for tonight’s post actually comes from a video game about Harry Potter’s Wizarding World. Yes, I am in fact writing about a video game based on a fictional world, and I invite you to find the thing in your life that you can relate to this experience. Each of the 300 posts of this blog, after all, are written for you and your life. ❤️

I bought a video game about Hogwarts (Harry Potter’s school for magic) a couple months ago. I play the game for a half hour or so every few days, and for the last week and a half I’ve been stuck on one particular magical battle in the game.

Last week as I lost again and again for a half hour straight, I got very frustrated. It can’t be healthy to get that frustrated, and it’s over a video game at that! I didn't sleep well that night, and I totally blamed the game for it.

Afterward, I considered a couple options to avoid that frustration. I could stop playing the game, or I could cheat and skip that part. But I didn’t make any decisions about it. I just allowed my frustration and my thinking about it to dissipate.

Tonight I sat down again to play, and when I lost the first battle, that familiar frustration began to rise up within me…and it was as if I was struck by a lightning bolt of insight: the game wasn’t the source of my frustration. The frustration was arising from within me. 

At that moment the game became free - it was unlinked from my frustration. There was the game over there, and my frustration over here with me.

(Imagine the gift it is to the people in our lives when we unlink them from our frustration...)

I could so easily see right then many different moments just like it when I was a kid and stuck at a frustrating moment in other games. 

The age of that frustration is young - like 9 years old at the oldest. 

I kept playing the game after that insight, allowing myself to grow in mastery of the techniques of the game while relaxing and calming my inner feelings about it. There was the outer game of mastering Hogwarts, and then there was the inner game of mastering my emotional reactions to that outer game. 

And that’s how Hogwarts Legacy became a powerful life teacher for me tonight.

For 300 posts, isn’t this exactly how this blog has read? Something happens, we react to it, and then freedom is accessed in part by separating "what happened" from our inner reaction to it. 

The birthplace of frustration is still there within me, and it flares up and barks with my voice sometimes. And it’s the same frustration of that 9 year old playing video games, and the 10 year old who didn’t want to walk the dog when I was told to, and the 12 year old whose friends weren’t listening on the playground, and the 26 year old whose classroom of students wasn’t behaving as they should. 

And in each of those examples, true freedom wasn’t found in firing my frustration at others or my circumstances. It has only ever been found by owning what’s mine and letting others be as they are. 

There are many ways to do that, and it’s a miracle every single time.

Much Love. ❤️