Oops, I Did It Again!

Yesterday, I was, in the words of Pema Chodron, hooked. Being hooked triggers our habitual fear responses. We can get hooked by something as simple as missing a green light when we are rushing somewhere. When you are hooked you feel a familiar tightening, a withdrawing, a wish for relief, a wish for things to be something other than what they are. Being hooked can make us feel angry, ashamed, anxious, jealous, and other emotions that poison us.

There is a great ad campaign for Southwest Airlines. In the commercial, someone does something really embarrassing. As soon as the realization hits and the person wants to crawl in a hole somewhere, a voice says, “Want to get away?” It’s a great commercial, because all of us can relate to the person who has just goofed. We’ve all been there.

Yesterday, I thought I had goofed. But I didn’t stop there. My mind raced with all the possible consequences of my perceived bad judgment. Each consequence was more dire than the last. I tried some of my techniques. I breathed deeply. I reminded myself of the Dalai Lama’s words, “If the problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry. Alternatively, if there is no way out, no possibility of resolution, then there is also no point in being worried about it, because you can’t do anything about it anyway.”

I tried to pause, to sit with the feelings and not panic, to wait and see how things developed, to trust that everything would be all right. But it was too late. I was hooked like a fish who had swallowed the hook. My imagination was a runaway train, and my efforts did nothing to slow it down. I couldn’t eat. I felt sick. My world seemed to be crashing down around me.

I raced around all day trying to anticipate and prepare for the worst. And then towards the end of the day, a miracle. The situation righted itself and all was well. It took me awhile to grasp that I hadn’t made a mistake after all. I took stock. I was wrung out. My stomach was still knotted up. I had a headache. It was like waking up from a bad dream. And that is all it was, after all. A dream I made up and then believed.

I laughed weakly and practiced a little compassion on myslf. My therapist used to tease me gently when I would fall off on my high horse expectations of perfection. “Welcome to the human race,” she would smile. It’s good to be home.

Life in Four Words

On Sunday the pastor spoke of sitting around with some clergy buddies over breakfast, trying to articulate the essential message of the whole Bible. (I don’t know about you, but this is not my usual topic of conversation at the breakfast table. I am more typically engaged in deep conversation about whether my daughter is pleased with the way her hair looks before she goes to school.)

So here it is–the essential message of the whole Bible. Wake up. Grow up.

Wake up, meaning: See the world as it really is. Grow up, meaning: Accept life on its terms and not your own.

Wow, I thought. The whole Bible in four words. (To think I spent an entire year reading it from cover to cover.) And then I thought, this is really the essential message of Buddhism, too, at least as I understand it. And isn’t this really what I learned from all those years in therapy? Clearly, these four words have wider application.

Wake up–see the world as it really is. What would our lives be like if we were awake? Buddha means “the awakened one.” Here is my favorite story about Buddha.

One day, soon after Buddha’s enlightenment, a man saw Buddha walking toward him. The man had not heard of Buddha, but he could see that there was something different about the man who was approaching, so he was moved to ask, “Are you a god?”

Buddha answered, “No.”

“You’re a magician, then? A sorcerer? A wizard?”

“No.”

“Are you some kind of celestial being? An angel, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Well, then what are you?”

The Buddha replied, “I am awake.”

A Course in Miracles says in the introduction, “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”

The Tao Te Ching says:
He who knows how to live can walk abroad
Without fear of rhinoceros or tiger.
He will not be wounded in battle.
For in him rhinoceroses can find no place to thrust their horn,
Tigers no place to use their claws,
And weapons no place to pierce.
Why is this so?
Because he has no place for death to enter.

From Plato’s theory of shadows to the present day, we are intrigued with the idea that what we spend most of our time reacting to as “reality” is not true reality. For example, the idea that we are separate from one another is born of fear rather than truth. When we wake up, we realize that there is nothing to fear because we are all united at our deepest energetic (soul) level.

Grow up–accept life on its own terms and not your own. Recovering alcoholics know all about growing up. It is the essence of the serenity prayer used in 12 step programs. “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This is also a great prayer for control freaks. I’ve used it more than a few times myself.

Accepting life on its own terms is the key to release from suffering according to the four noble truths of Buddhism. We suffer because we want things to be different, and we base our happiness on whether we can make them different. For example, I wanted my son James to be not autistic. And indeed that desire caused me a lot of suffering over the years. We hold our happiness hostage to “if only....”

In her book Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach says, “Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is. A moment of Radical Acceptance is a moment of genuine freedom.” Accepting life on its own terms frees us from so much pain.

Wake up. Grow up. Maybe I don’t need ten steps to find my happy place after all. Maybe I just need these two.

Blog Update

Dear Readers,

I am still learning about this blog business, but I have added two things you might like. First, I figured out how to make commenting easier. Now you can comment whether you have a Google account or not, and you can comment anonymously. I hope you will feel free to share your thoughts and ideas now that it is easier and more private. Just click on the little pencil and the word "comment" at the end of any post. The number of comments also appears there and if you want to read other comments, just click on the same place.

Also, I added an email link at the top of the right column. You can click on that and email me directly. I would love to hear from you.

Thank you for stopping by to check out the blog.

Galen Pearl

I Had a Great Week, Thank You!

Several times this week, I caught myself complaining when someone asked me how I was, or how my week was going. Why did I do that? Why did I respond that I had spent a lot of frustrating time on hold on the phone instead of saying that I was enjoying the early spring? Why do we often try to connect with each other by sharing our annoyances rather than by sharing our joys?

Complaining is a habit. It keeps us from our happy place. We can change this habit. Will Bowen started a program at his church called A Complaint Free World. (You can learn more about it at www.acomplaintfreeworld.org.) Based on studies showing that it takes about 21 days to form a new habit, he encouraged his congregation to replace the habit of complaining with the habit of being positive. Everyone wore a purple plastic bracelet as a visual reminder. Each time a person caught herself complaining, she would switch the bracelet to the other wrist. The goal was to go 21 days without complaining. (I would be happy to go 21 minutes!)

To change a habit, we must first be aware of it. Try to notice when you complain. When do you tend to complain? To whom? About what? Once we become aware of our complaint habits, we need to substitute a more desirable habit. If you want a toddler to hand over some inappropriate but coveted object, what is the best approach? Yank it from his hand? Or offer him something more attractive?

Our minds work the same way. If you simply try to stop the bad habit, it will flow back in to fill the void. So when you catch yourself complaining, substitute a positive thought. You will feel happier yourself, and you will lift up those around you. Misery might love company, but joy creates company. Good company. Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired millions by describing his dream rather than by describing his pain.

Watch out–if you catch yourself complaining and then criticize yourself for the lapse, that is two complaints! Give yourself a thumbs up for every complaint free period you have, however brief it is. When a nun complained to Father Keating that during her time of contemplative prayer, she had to refocus her wandering thoughts a thousand times, he opened his arms wide and exclaimed, “That’s wonderful! That is a thousand times you were connected to God!”

Zero Degrees of Separation

Remember the movie Six Degrees of Separation? The premise is that any person is separated from anyone else on Earth by no more than six degrees. That is, if you are one step away from everyone you know, and two steps away from everyone they know, it will take at most six steps to connect you to anyone on the planet. My personal theory is that if you grew up in Memphis, like I did, you are separated by no more than two degrees from Elvis.

But here is a more important theory that I learned from A Course in Miracles. Any separation from any other person is a separation from God. (When I say God I mean God in whatever sense is meaningful to you.) How do we separate ourselves from people? By judging, criticizing, hating, fearing, labeling, dismissing, stereotyping, condemning. By seeing them as “other.”

So ponder that for a moment. Every time you separate yourself from another person, you are separating yourself from God. Every time. Very hard to live in your happy place if you are separated from God. On the other hand, it is very hard not to see as separate that person who was really rude in the checkout line at the grocery store. Or the homeless person reeking of booze asking you for money. Or the CEO of a bailed out company pocketing a gazillion dollar bonus. Or your ex.

Yet many faiths and psychological theories stand firm on the foundation that our ticket to our happy place is our connection with others. Which brings us to the good news. Every time we open our hearts and connect with another person, we connect to God. Every time. So that gives me pause, at least occasionally, when I am poised to cast that first stone. Is it worth separating myself from God? Is it really?

As Pogo said, “We have seen the enemy and he is us.” There is no them. There is only us. Namaste.

(By the way, the six degrees idea inspired a game, Six Degrees of Separation from Kevin Bacon, which became sort of a catch phrase for the six-degrees-it’s-a-small-world-after-all concept. The real Kevin Bacon created a website in conjunction with Network for Good at www.sixdegrees.org to help people support their favorite charities.)

Happy Habits 2

Here is a cumulative review of some habits that will help us reset our homepage and stay in our happy place. Some of the techniques might be relevant to more than one step. The list of all 10 steps was posted Feb. 3.

Step 1. Give yourself permission to be happy.

When you become aware that you are resisting happiness, remind yourself, “Fun is good.”

When you have a choice to make, choose in alignment with your passions.

Step 3. Give up the delusion of control.

When you sense your anxiety rising because things are not turning out the way you planned, take a deep breath and say to yourself, “The life-span of the butterfly is precisely the right length.”

When life presents you with a game change, try to open rather than close your heart and see what happens.

Step 4. Feel your feelings.

Try to accept your feelings. All of them. Just acknowledge them and say, “This, too. This, too.”

Step 6. Judge not.

Before you jump to judgment about a situation, remind yourself, “Who knows if it is good or bad?”

Step 7. Practice compassion.

As you go through your day, notice people. Remind yourself that the person you are noticing might be Jesus.

Step 8. Forgive everyone.

When your heart feels hard, contemplate Amish forgiveness.

If you are unable to forgive someone, bless that person every time you think of her. You might say, “God bless [name] and please help me mean it." Repeat until you do!

Step 9. Develop an attitude of gratitude.

When something rubs you the wrong way, say, “I’m grateful for that!” Keep thinking of things to be grateful for until you really are grateful.

Step 10. Enter the gate.

When life presents you with a game change, try to stay in the present moment. Stay open and listen. Attend.

Game Change

I just read a book titled Game Change about the 2008 presidential election. The authors used the term “game change” to refer to those moments in the campaigns when the wind shifted, or the sun broke through, or the tsunami hit.

When my son was in middle school, he was in a special class for kids with developmental disabilities. One Friday afternoon I waited outside to pick James up after school. We were headed up to the mountains for the weekend, and I was eager to get ahead of the traffic. The teachers always walked the kids from his class outside to make sure they got on the right buses or were met by parents. One of the teachers walked over to me and blurted out, “A terrible thing is happening to one of our students. Dan’s father died recently. Now his mother is dying and there is no one to take him. He will have to go into foster care, but there is no foster family qualified to keep him because of his autism. He will have to go to a residential facility.”

As she began telling the story, I felt the ground shift under my feet. It seemed like I was inside a tank turret looking through the little rectangular opening and the gears began whirring as the turret turned to aim in a different direction. I didn’t want it to turn. I wanted to get James and my daughter and head up to the mountains for a relaxing weekend. I did not want to hear about Dan. In my mind, I covered my ears with my hands and started singing, La la la, I can’t hear you!

But I did hear, and my life was changed. I wanted my life to go on as it was, but my life could never be as it was because now I had a choice that was not there moments before. My life was changed no matter what I chose.

Two weeks later, on the day his mother died, Dan joined our family. He was 14. He and James became brothers. Now they share an apartment in a small complex operated by a wonderful organization serving the needs of adults with developmental disabilities. They will always have each other.