I first heard the expression "You can be happy or you can be right" from Wayne Dyer. When I heard that I couldn't imagine that that could be true. All my life I have equated being right with happiness. After all, doesn't it feel yucky to be wrong? Who likes being wrong? It never occurred to me that being right didn't make me happy - it just made me feel things like smarter, superior, on the right team, or more morally correct. These are all ego based things, and with all things that the ego needs, they can turn into monsters that must be fed endlessly. I may have felt a momentary sense of satisfaction, but I wasn't feeling the pure, exalted happiness that comes from tuning into love and a sense of oneness. Despite my initial resistance, I've continued to think over this phrase and try to make sense of it. I've been pondering it and coming at it from different angles for years. And don't you know, I'm starting to realize - he's right! When I'm angry with someone what I used to want was to feel validated in my anger. I wanted to feel that I was right to feel angry. And all of that focus on what someone did that made me angry only intensified my focus on the thing that made me angry! I can now see that if I want to be happy, I have to remove my attention from the thing I don't like. So when someone does something that upsets me I ask myself what's more important, focusing on their behavior or looking for love, compassion and joy. Once I stop focusing on why they were wrong to do or say what they did I allow in a lot of other thoughts. I remember that when people lash out, it's a projection of inner pain. When people are judgmental, it's a projection of their own self-judgement. And a lot of times people aren't even wrong - they're just not behaving in the way I want them to behave. In order to be happy I have to let go of the need to control, because what can I control anyways other than my own feelings? This point really came home for me this past Sunday. I went to a recreation area that's popular for hiking and sitting by the river. On this particular day it was busier than I've ever seen it. It was flooded with people and more were continually coming. I didn't know if I should stay - it was so crowded it defeated the point of having quiet time to commune with nature. But what the heck - I'd see if I could get a parking spot. If I found one I'd take it as a sign that I was meant to enjoy this place. As I circled through the packed lot several other parking vultures circled with me. It was looking dire and I started to leave. But then as I passed the last aisle I saw a spot. The last spot! Waiting there, for me! It really was meant to be. I began backing up so that I could turn into the lane and get the spot on the end. It was obvious what I was doing, and then - AND THEN - someone ZOOMED in, cut me off and cranked their wheel to dive bomb into the spot! I've never seen anything like it. I couldn't believe it. I sat there for a moment, dumbfounded. Did that guy really just do something so brazenly rude and selfish? What the fu - okay I'll stop here, you don't need to hear the inner monologue of curse words I was hurtling his way. Needless to say, I was irritated. This felt like one of those examples of how rude and terrible people can be. I wanted to take this in as an example of why you can't trust people, why it's normal to feel irritated with people and why sometimes I AM RIGHT DAMN IT. He was RUDE. He was wrong! Grrraaaaaahhhhhhh! As these thoughts began piling up it hit me - this doesn't feel good. There's nothing about being right in this scenario that feels good. And so I did something I never do. I let it go. I just let it go. I decided it wasn't worth my happiness to think about. It wasn't worth my energy to linger in this place. It was over. What did I want to think about instead? What did I want to feel instead? Now that's a question I don't ask myself enough, especially when I'm too busy contemplating how rotten people are out there stealing my parking spots. What do I want to feel in this moment? As I began to think about what made me happy - the fresh air, the birds singing, the blue sky, I began to feel lighter. And then I began to think about another phrase I've heard often - everything is working out for me. I listened to the birds, breathed calm and deep and repeated, "Everything is working out for me." I began to consider that maybe he was meant to take that parking spot. After all, it was so busy, would I have even enjoyed myself? Or would I have been annoyed with the crowds and the noise? Maybe he was actually doing me a favor. Maybe everything really was working out for me. I thanked the man for showing me that the rec area was so crazy people were acting like ravenous parking madmen, and no, I would not have enjoyed that much insanity while trying to be peaceful and quiet by the river. Thank you. Everything is working out for me. I decided then to drive through the tiny little gold rush town just to see if I wanted to hang out there. As I pulled into "town", AKA a bar and an ice cream shop, the street was also flooded with cars and people. This was just not going to happen. So I decided to drive on and enjoy the back roads. I wouldn't sit by the river, but I could enjoy the fresh air and quiet in a different way. I wasn't exactly sure which way to go, but I knew that somehow I could go a back way and connect back to the main highway. As I drove along I began to relax and enjoy the feeling that I was right where I was supposed to be. I came down to Orange Blossom Road and suddenly everything opened up. I looked down and saw a river outlet. It looked like you could walk down there. It looked like I could actually go down there and have what I'd yearned for all along - peaceful solitude in nature. But I wasn't sure if this was private property. As I pulled up I saw some people walking up with fishing poles. It was then that I saw the sign and trail going down. The fact that I arrived just as they were leaving felt like serendipitous timing. I was being shown the way. Thank you. Everything is working out for me. I went down and felt the most glorious sense of trust and support. I felt like this was all a metaphor for life. When I let go of what wasn't meant for me I can get to the thing that is so much better. After all, you never know what's just around the corner, or in my case, just down a beautiful back road lined with blooming cheery trees. As I sat by the water, listening to the birds sing, the wind in the reeds and the distant hum of cars I felt immense gratitude. For myself, for letting go and trusting. For God, for showing me a better way. And for Earth, for this beautiful, restorative moment. I'm still working at this, and still catching myself in moments of "Look what they did!" But I'm reminding myself now to let go and to know that another Orange Blossom Road is always just around the corner. However, I can't see it if all I'm looking at is the guy that stole my parking spot. Photos by:
Paulette Wooten on Unsplash; Zachary Nelson on Unsplash; Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash; Huyen Nguyen on Unsplash
Comments
This is an article I originally wrote for Tiny Buddha. It was republished with permission from tinybuddha.com. You can find the original post here. When it comes to facing fear and moving past it in order to see my dreams realized, I was always advised to power through it. Do the thing that scares you, no matter how much it makes your heart pound. Take that step that makes your stomach knot up in tight balls. Do it, and power through, or else miss out on life. For a long time, I felt these were my only two options. I could either have moments of crippling fear as I chased what I wanted, or I could feel like life was passing me by as I let my passions die. One of my passions is writing screenplays, and so I continually did what I thought I should do in order to become a successful screenwriter. I called people who gave me anxiety. I put my work out to places I felt I wasn’t ready for. With each step I took, I hoped and prayed I would get more comfortable. I couldn’t live with the constant fear I was feeling, and yet no amount of powering through was making it go away. It was in fact growing, because it felt like I had no control over it. The fear was getting larger than my dreams, and I became exhausted and eventually burned out. I had no choice then but to take time to pause and reflect. When I did, I could see the counter-productive patterns I was engaging in. I was forcing myself to do things that brought me angst rather than joy. The advice to power through had turned me into a bully toward myself. Because I wasn’t doing the kind of behavior I normally associate with being self-destructive, such as constantly criticizing myself, I didn’t see my actions as being hurtful. In fact, I saw them as honoring my journey because I was chasing my biggest goals. However, when the dust settled and I stepped back, it was very clear that by powering forward, I had left behind a crucial thing: self-love. I wasn’t listening to myself. Because our inner world is always mirrored back to us, I always had the frustrating feeling that people weren’t listening to me. Instead of hearing my great ideas, they would hear the shake in my voice. They would hear me rambling on because I was too nervous to be clear and concise, and they would tune out, ending the call as I would slump down in my chair, knowing I’d blown it. Compounding this is the fact that I also wasn’t treating myself as an important person. I wasn’t honoring that the fear and anxiety was taking a toll. This too was mirrored back in the fact that people forgot me as soon as we connected. I never got any follow-up calls after my initial pitches, which only fed into my fears more. The momentum I had going was certainly powering me onward, but in the opposite direction of what I wanted. Once I could see the patterns, the solution was obvious. The old adage “what you resist persists” repeated in my mind. I had to first of all accept that I was living from a place of fear. I allowed myself to acknowledge that I didn’t like being afraid all the time. This swept through me in a wave of relief, and I felt free to choose what I wanted rather than what I felt I was supposed to do. I began cultivating and prioritizing self-love. The more I slowed down, took time to ask myself if I was okay, and returned to my meditation practice, the easier things got. What began to reflect back to me were my new feelings—that I’m important and what I do is important. As I went through this process, I was able to stop fearing fear itself. This too helped me to reverse my momentum even further, because I was open to receiving new information. I learned how fear begins in my brain and body. Once I understood how it worked, it wasn’t this huge, abstract, and uncontrollable thing. Fear begins in a place in the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala processes a situation and decides if it’s safe or if you need to get scared and run away. If it decides something’s not safe hormones are released in order to get your body moving and prepare you for fight or flight. Attached to the amygdala is the hippocampus, which is where your memories are stored. These two things work together. The amygdala looks at old memories as a way of assessing a current situation. This process is meant to be helpful, but when we’re not aware of it, it can run amok and become hurtful. As an example from my own life, one bad phone call with a potential agent had been stored in my memories. From that point onward, when I went to call someone with a pitch, my amygdala would access that memory and immediately label all related phone calls as bad, which steamrolled as I would get more anxious, have more bad phone calls, and dread any interaction. This was my brain trying to protect me by ensuring I wouldn’t engage in something that might cause me harm or emotional pain. Understanding this about my body and how I process things gave me a huge amount of self-power back. It was reassuring first of all to know I wasn’t trying to subconsciously sabotage myself, but to instead keep myself safe. It was also reassuring to know where this started, because once I was aware of the root of it, I could begin untangling myself from it. The more I began to see fear as something I could manage, the more I felt I could work with the fear rather than trying to power through it. It was then that I began to feel that thing I’d yearned for but felt was impossible to reach—excitement. I remembered why I’d started writing in the first place. I felt excitement to share my stories and see them made into films. I felt excitement about contacting people who were passionate about film also. I remembered how good it was to feel excited about talking to people rather than fearful. From this new, more self-love based place, I started contacting people again. I listened to my inner voice, and if something made me feel fear, I would stop. I would tune in, breathe, and ask myself if I was attaching old, unrelated memories, or if it really was my intuition trying to tell me something was amiss. I’m happy to say people are requesting my scripts again, and I’m now enjoying pursuing my passions more than ever. I wake up excited rather than with dread. I take steps and go for things, as I did before, but without feeling like I’m stretching a rubber band that’s about to snap. If you’re also paralyzing yourself with fear, see what happens when you put self-love first. When you believe that you’re worth listening to, and show up confident, without an energy of desperation, people will be far more interested in what you have to say. And when you feel your fear creeping back in, instead of ignoring it and pushing through it, step back, breathe, and remember that your own mind and body have created it to help you. When you realize it’s not some big, monstrous force that shows up without your consent—that you’ve created it to keep yourself safe—you can learn to let it go. Today I went on a lovely bike ride with one of my parents. While I was riding, I was thinking of how I hold onto past feelings from people I feel let down or hurt by. I was thinking of a specific person in relation to this - who I was also on the ride with - and the tenuous relationship we've had over the years. I've worked out a lot of my feelings over this, but sometimes, I can still feel myself holding onto those past experiences and feelings. Even now, after this person has changed and shown considerable growth, I still see them as that overbearing, angry and critical person from my childhood and teenage years. I realized today, it's almost as if I'm holding this person emotionally hostage. I'm forcing them to stay in one place, and to always be that person I remember them as. In some ways, this justifies certain things I've done. Things I did because I was either emulating their behavior or projecting my inner pain outwards. I began to wonder why I want this person to stay as that vision in my mind, when I hated them when they were that person. Wouldn't I rather see them as they are now, or at least try to be more objective in my view, so that I could let in the love? Love is so much easier to carry around than hate. As I biked, I thought about how much I've changed, and how much it would hurt me if I wasn't allowed to grow and be different. What if someone was insisting on tethering me to my past in the same way? It of course would not feel good, and as I biked, I realized this hurts me as much as them. I saw it like one person literally holding another hostage. When you're the person holding another down, it appears as if the person being held hostage is the one being trapped against their will. But isn't the person doing the holding trapped also? How can they be free if they have to make sure this person stays in place? How can I be free if all my energy is focused on tethering us to the past, just to prove something that only I can see? By letting this person go, and by not caring who they were, or even who they are now, I allow myself to be free. I no longer have to put all my energy on holding onto something, but instead, can completely let go. And by letting go, I can embrace and allow all of my own beautiful growth. By stubbornly sticking to only one view of this person I was short changing my own growth. I wasn't allowing myself to grow in a way that saw a bigger perspective. I wasn't even trying to see that this person too had also been wounded, disappointed, and sucker punched by life. I had locked myself into place while holding the key that would set me free. The key to my freedom was the same as theirs. That day, I set us both free, and I never looked back. "If you feel crappy, it's because your brain is telling you that there's a problem that's unaddressed or unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it's because you're supposed to do something. Many people are taught to repress their emotions for various personal, social or cultural reasons - particularly negative emotions. Sadly, to deny one's negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person to solve problems." - Mark Manson: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck During our journey to Self, to our true self, we start to idealize the idea of knowing ourselves. Knowing who we are and really getting clear on it and owning it. The thing with that is, when you feel you know who you are, you begin to solidify that sense of self. This can feel like a good thing, like we see ourselves, the good, the bad, the highs, the lows, and we come to peace with it. However, on the flip side, when we start over associating with a sense of identity we close ourselves off to what is outside of that identity. Things that we may not even be able to consider because they are too far outside of our perspective. Further more, we might only be knowing the surface stuff, the stuff we accumulated through life experiences, while completely ignoring the deeper self. We tend not to get to know this deeper Self because it goes beyond labels, and if we can't label ourselves then how can that be who we are.... we are the I am's right? I am a writer. I am spiritual. I am kind. I am brave. I am young. I am old. But the Self that just is, the self that is I AM and nothing more, that IS who we are. I AM. Everything else... it's an idea construction. It's thoughts we've turned into a sense of identity in order to try to understand how we fit in this world. For example, I have always said that I'm afraid of public speaking. I have said it and thought it so many times I have taken it in as some core, immutable truth about myself. However, there's nothing about that that is actually who I am. Who I am really, in my core, is love. I am the Universe. I am infinite. So how can I be terrified of crowds, which comes from a place of fear and limitation, and also be infinite and full of love at the same time? The only way I can do this is to convince my mind that it's true and it's real. I allow experiences to convince me further it's real, when it's really only my thoughts and beliefs being reflected back to me. The feeling that it's real is the part that can be hard to shake, because damn if it doesn't feel real. But it's not. It's an illusion, a cloak I have chosen to put on and experiment with during this life. I could take it off at anytime. I could declare I'm done with it at anytime. These feelings of who and what we are go far beyond this. We might see ourselves as struggling business owners, always looking for a way to break free, and not even being aware we are so entrenched in an identity that is the very reason we can't break free. We might be convinced that being an exhausted mom is what we are, completely forgetting that below the fatigue is something spectacular, powerful, and completely holy and divine. We cannot see what we don't believe in. If we believe we are this or that, we will see it reflected back over and over. For example, think about how often you lose something, only to realize it was right in front of you the whole time. You simply didn't believe it was there, so you couldn't see it. The thing that stops me, or any of us, from instantly dropping these self-created identity illusions is the ego. Ah, the ego! Before we all go bashing our egos and talking about how it needs to die, let's take a deep breath. Breathe. Relax. The ego is a part of you. Wanting to destroy or kill a part of yourself is only going to make that part dig in deeper. It's only going to feed the fear that made it all grow so big in the first place. In the same way you cannot hate another person into changing, you cannot hate your ego into calming down and working with you. We work with the ego in the same way we work with other people - by coming at it from a place of openness and love and curiosity. The ego, at its core, is love. How could it not be? Either everything originated in love or it didn't. So we can relax and know that when we're working with the ego, we're working with something created in the same primordial atom as everything you see as good and beautiful in the Universe. This doesn't mean it's easy to change the ego though. Getting your ego to loosen its grip on who you think you are and what you believe you are is like prying open a steal door. But that doesn't mean it's not worth it. Letting go of the idea that our identities are real is when we can truly begin to be who we know we really are, deep inside. Letting go of all of those false stories also means we can create new ones, however we want. It doesn't mean we have to become a blank canvas with zero personality. It means you are free to create your sense of identity as you feel you want to. Do you want to be afraid of public speaking? Or do you want to be confident and self-assured? You can have either one. You simply have to believe you can. The power of belief, which ties deeply in with the ego, is the other thing that locks us into identities. In order to cast off identities you don't want and create new ones you've got to get clear on what you believe. Do you believe you create your reality? Do you believe in your power to recreate yourself anew at anytime? Do you believe that belief itself is powerless and we're all victims of circumstance? In this world, our sense of self is attached to so many things that it can be hard to even consider letting it go. It may seem like we're rejecting diversity or what makes us add color and uniqueness to this world, but that's not what we're aiming for. I'm not writing this to say deep down we're all the same. I'm writing this to say that deep down yes, we are all love, but we are also unique and special and gifted and insanely talented in ways we aren't even considering. In ways that you know intuitively but you can't label. In ways that allow you to access the keys of the Universe. A way that is beyond whatever your sense of identity has locked you into. In a way that says you are all the Dianes. Diane is a character on Bojack Horseman. In one episode, she takes a drug called "gushie" and suddenly has a mind-opening experience. She realizes that she thinks she knows who she is, but in fact, she is so much more. "And sometimes I think that I know myself, but maybe that's a trap. I set the coffee pot to start brewing at 4:10 AM. I put out the clothes I was planning to wear the next day. I did everything I could to send a clear signal to my mind and body that I was doing this. I was going to make the 5 AM Kundalini yoga and Kirtan class. When I saw the class listed on Mind Body I was intrigued. I've done Kundalini yoga before, and I've always found it has a powerful way of breaking through habits, patterns and mental blocks in a way nothing else does. It just seems to tear down the walls of rigidity and open me up to things I couldn't or wouldn't see from my old perspective. Sometimes I go to things like this not for the meditation itself, but to remind myself I can be very committed and determined when I want to be. It's a powerful reminder to my mind, my body, my soul that when I want something bad enough, I will do whatever it takes to get there. I can muster up willpower for anything, but I don't always acknowledge that in myself. The plan went off without a hitch, I drove downtown, and got there at 5AM and... no one was there. I looked through the glass door, unsure what to do. The streets were empty. I wrapped my jacket tighter around me, wishing the sun wasn't over an hour away from rising. Occasionally, someone would pass me, and I felt weird and out of place. I knew they were wondering why I was lingering outside this shop in the dark. I never get up this early, and here I was, full of anticipation for this class that didn't seem to be happening. I didn't understand why I'd felt so powerfully guided to be here, just so I could be disappointed and cold. Since I was there, I decided to wait. I went back to my car for awhile and finished off my coffee. I visualized someone coming, trying to will this experience into existence. Finally, after what felt like the longest 15 minutes ever, someone came. She was a student, and she assured me the teacher would come. At last, a woman with a white turban and flowy white clothes showed up, and I knew it was her. I was glad I'd waited and hadn't driven home to go back to sleep like I'd considered. The class began, and as we went along the Kundalini energized me and awakened me. I didn't feel like I'd gotten up at the torturous hour of 4, but instead, I felt refreshed and grateful everything had worked out. Kundalini yoga, unlike other yoga, is not a flow from pose to pose. Instead, it's a series of postures that are intended to move energy through your body. The poses themselves are meant to be uncomfortable. Each pose usually involves a fast movement, such as sitting down and twisting left to right, while breathing in and out quickly.
Most of the postures aren't difficult. It's not uncomfortable in the sense that you must be strong and flexible to do them. Rather, you position yourself in a way you normally wouldn't. This is intended to break up blocks, stuck energy, and mental barriers. It gets you out of hard wired thoughts, beliefs and patterns, and frees you into new ideas, feelings, connections, beliefs and also, to a deeper connection to God. After the class ended at 7:30 (it was two hours!) I thought I'd be exhausted. But I remained energized well into the afternoon, at which point I had to take a nap. In the days that followed, things started to get interesting quickly. I spontaneously signed up for aerial yoga, which I've wanted to do for years but never did. I joined a gym with super early classes, and continued to push myself into more uncomfortable places. Getting up at 5AM for the gym has always been a no-go for me, but suddenly I was doing it. It made me exhausted (and a bit irritated in the beginning), but this snowball continued to pick up momentum. Out of nowhere, I felt I was done with sugar, and quit cold turkey. I hadn't had any alcohol in a few weeks, and I felt done with that also. And then came the craziest thing. Something I swore I wouldn't do, because it seemed too impossible, too far outside my reach. I gave up coffee. The thing I craved as soon as I opened my eyes. The thing I looked forward to each night, knowing it was part of my morning ritual. These changes led to more changes, and as my body began to feel stronger and healthier, I returned to regular ashtanga yoga classes. I always felt ashtanga was too challenging for me to really get into it, but then I began practicing the poses on my own, each morning, at 6AM. I was becoming a new person, and one that felt empowered in her body. I was no longer a slave to coffee, sugar, wine and my alarm clock. I felt freer than I ever had. I became healthier than I have ever been in my life. And it all began with that one morning of massive discomfort, which was accompanied by a powerful feeling of determination and commitment. Sometimes the very thing we want is right on the other side of a little discomfort. I had no idea where all of this was going to lead, but I'm so grateful I opened this door. It has given me new insights on myself, what I want and how I approach my life. It has energized me and awakened me in ways I didn't know I could be. |