It is our belief that we must be “someone” that punishes us – not the fact that the rest of the world doesn’t share that belief.

First time I read this statement I had no clue what the message was, but then I took a second (and third, and fourth) look and began to glimpse its truth.    The way I interpret the statement is that in my distorted mind I believe it is necessary for me to be associated with certain social or cultural labels to be happy.  Instead of just accepting and APPROVING of myself as I am, I keep telling myself I’m NOT good enough, that society/others require more from me in order to accept/love me.   As a result I am constantly imposing expectations onto myself that are based purely on incorrect beliefs.  The rest of the world doesn’t really care.  They will either accept or reject me for who I am in the NOW.  Why is it so difficult for me to also accept myself in the present?

Also in the process of trying to be “someone” I lose love for myself.  The constant internal reinforcement of the belief that I don’t measure up diminishes my self-worth.  My response to the pressure is to tell myself I “need to” do more to be accepted and good enough.  What a vicious cycle!

NOW, that I recognize the delusion, I can work on improving my self-worth and image.  Self-acceptance is the key to stopping the punishment and pain.  Using positive affirmations can help the process by emphasizing the good parts of me versus what I perceive to be lacking.  I am good.  I can love myself.  I am worthy of happiness.  I have a right to be ME. I can have love in my life.    Finding affirmations that reflect what we want in our lives is the solution.  Please join me and STOP focusing on what is lacking in our lives.  Let’s accept and live in the NOW.

Life is good!

Avoiding conflict and trying to please everyone around you can be quite a burden and often leads to larger issues.  Through most of my life I  wanted everyone around me to be happy and avoid conflict.  The problem is that in this distorted people-pleasing process I lose myself.  I sacrifice my desires and rights in an effort to avoid “rocking the boat”.  But in the long run I build resentments, get angry, and feel hurt, as a result of my “sacrifice.”  We all have the right to stand up for ourselves, voice our opinion, in an assertive manner.  The challenge is that many of us don’t know how to communicate in a constructive assertive way.  Instead we yell, get angry, demand, etc. which in turn makes us want to avoid conflict in the future.  It’s a vicious cycle.  However, with practice we can change how we communicate.

Another point to remember is that it is NOT your responsibility to make others happy.  You are simply not that powerful. It’s my ego that tells me that I am sooo important and wonderful that my mere presence makes people happy or sad.  Yeah, right. They are going to be happy or not on their own.  Part of acceptance is recognizing that I don’t control anyone or anything, except myself. I can decide how I react to someone’s comments/insults/praise just as others have that same choice.  When I get angry, I’ve made that choice.  NOONE made me angry. Anger was my chosen reaction.  Once I accept that I have choice I can choose to react positively or in a more constructive manner.  Anger never adds anything good to a situation. Having this knowledge let me stop trying to control, and instead, accept.  Life becomes much more peaceful living one moment (day) at a time.

A friend asked me about my thoughts about impatience and here are they are.  I’m not saying they are correct, merely my thoughts on the subject.  It’s a topic that is often on my mind.  As I have indicated I am a recovering compulsive gambler.  We are the masters of instant gratification.  We want what we want and we want it NOW.

Learn to see what upsets you not as an exterior circumstance to be fixed, but rather as an interior circumstance to be understood.

Most of my life I blamed, got mad at, felt disappointed, by people and things around me.  Now I recognize that I have no control over my surroundings.   Accepting this fact allows me to see that my only good choice is how I react to these external circumstances that I find unsettling.  Do I see myself as a victim?  Do I fear not being in control?  Does that make me angry? Is someone else at fault?  What’s behind the negative emotions?  Once I explore the reasons or beliefs that are driving my emotions I can break them down, contradict the thought’s falseness, and change how I react.  Once I accept I am responsible for my own life I stop being a victim.  When I accept that I cannot control anyone, or they me, I will stop getting angry when I don’t get my way.  Once I understand that getting angry over something that has happened doesn’t change the situation, it’s done and now in the past, I can stop being angry, instead look for ways to move forward.  And when I feel wronged I can remember I have hurt others and it becomes easier to forgive. 

Life is not always fair nor are any of us perfect, however, that doesn’t mean we can’t have a wonderful life.  We can.  It’s our choice.  All it takes is to take the time to look around and we will feel gratitude for the existence we have in place of the anger for life’s obstacles. 

Don’t seek answers to tormenting questions when it’s possible to realize that there’s nothing to gain through torment – And then leave it at that.

Living a life based on the “would have, could have, should haves” is not living at all, it’s merely existing, not in the present, but in the past.  This has been a major issue for me throughout my life.  I was full of regret, shame, guilt, self-doubt, and had a low self-worth.  How can anyone live a happy life with all this negative baggage weighing us down?  I certainly couldn’t. 

Then one day I heard a speaker talk about regret.  He said regret is a false hope to go back in time and do something differently and then come BACK to the present.  Obviously time travel is not possible so why waste time and energy on thinking about it?  We can’t go back!   Eckhart Tolle in “Power of Now” explains there really is no past; all we have is the current MOMENT.   The past exists only in our minds.  As long as we allow the past to linger in our minds we remain in an illusion and cannot be in the present.

Slowly I’m learning to accept that whatever took place in the past is done and over with.  It does NOT define who or what I am unless I it let it.   In the present I have and can make different choices, I can feel the connectivity to the now and my surroundings, and can recognize that there are no limits except for the ones self-imposed within my own mind. 

Practicing being present is challenging but I keep working on it.  I think doing my best to live a life based on love and forgiveness will continuously bring me closer to the present.  People often say “live life one day at a time”.  I believe I finally GET that statement.  For me, it means that I can forgive my “yesterdays” and I don’t have to worry about my tomorrows because all I have is TODAY, just this moment.

Is it the same as religion?  I don’t think so. I gave a lot of thought to this subject early on and here are some things I came up with for myself.  I’m not saying any of this is right, merely conveying my experience.

First of all, being spiritual cannot coexist with ego.  During a period of my life when I had no concept of God or Spirituality, and I was in the midst of my addition, I used to say “I’m not god, I just tell god what to do”.  Nuts, huh?  That’s my ego telling me I have all the answers and don’t need anything else.  “I am in control!” it says.

As I embarked on my spiritual journey I have come to believe that the very first thing I needed to do was accept that I don’t have all the answer, that my decisions are not always the best.  It means being willing to look beyond myself for answers, even if the exercise is as simple as asking another human being for help.  As I continued to seek guidance outside of my own scope I began sensing that there was more to life, I felt a sense of belonging, of being connected to everything around me where I previously sought to be separate.  I was alone and then I wasn’t.  I’m learning to look for commonalities where I used to judge, for forgiveness versus justifying, and arrogance is slowly being replaced by humility.   Slowly being the optimum term.  What can I say?  Turns out I’m a slow learner (hehe).

The next spirituality lesson I received was through conversation with a friend of mine.  He’s devoted Catholic and spiritual person.  I was telling him all the problems I had with organized religion, spiritual teachings, and several statements made in religious texts.  I told him “this and this” just doesn’t make sense.  If it doesn’t make sense I’m NOT going to accept it.  I WANT MY ANSWERS DAMN IT!  His response was very simple and opened my mind.  He said, “It’s awfully arrogant of you to think that you have the mental capacity to understand or comprehend the grand scheme of things.”   The statement shut me up.  The implication was profound.  I recognized that I was putting myself on equal level with God, Source Energy, spiritual being, whatever you want to label the Universal Force.  How could I possibly do that?  This became a true “light-bulb” moment for me.   Thanks, Tom.

Today I believe we all are part of a continuous energy, that we are ALL connected.  Beyond that I don’t know.  In spite of religious differences I think fundamentally we all seek the same.  However, we take different paths on the journey.  Things like kindness, love, forgiveness, overall good, exists at the core of all religions and spiritual teachings.   Perhaps we can focus on what we have in common instead who is right or our differences?

Today life is good because I have found spirituality.  I wake up each morning with an inherent sense that I’m alright regardless of the perceived challenges I may encounter.  This spiritual feeling instills great peace of mind.  What more can I want?

Let go of who you think you are and discover what life would be like if you had wings.

Defining ourselves as good, bad, republican, democrat, religious, Caucasian, Asian, or giving ourselves any other label, truly limits us.  Nevertheless, this is exactly how most of describe who we are.  We put ourselves in boxes; all based on general beliefs and broad-based labels of who we are.  If I define myself as a democrat it doesn’t mean I agree with ALL other democrats or all their politics.  If I add that I love to cook, am spiritual, allergic to cats and dogs, wear shorts as much as possible, people start to assemble an image of me.  An image that is based on assumptions they make off the broad-based pieces of information they received.  Are they getting an accurate picture of who I am?  No!  We are all so much more than the labels we impose on ourselves.  So let’s stop worrying about who we think we are.  Let’s stop limiting ourselves, putting ourselves in boxes, and instead BE.  Having wings means we are limitless.  We can be anything we want.  We can do anything we want.  We have choice.

Defeat comes from clinging to solutions that don’t work. 

As a recovering addict I can totally relate to the statement above.  I lived it.  For years when trying to quit my addiction I followed the same strategy ever time.  And I failed every time.  Insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again, yet, expecting a different outcome each time.   It never happens.  I kept telling myself that this time things would be different.  I was unwilling to accept that MY WAY wasn’t the right way.  My ego prevented me from seeing that there were other options and solutions.   Just imagine, if I admitted my strategy wasn’t working I was admitting I was wrong.  I couldn’t allow THAT to happen!   My stubbornness and ego added years of hurt and suffering to the lives of those closest to me and to my own life, just because I wouldn’t admit nor accept that I was wrong.  Now I see that if something doesn’t work I CAN explore other options instead of clinging to the ones that don’t work.

The only thing you’re sure of losing when you let go of something that you are afraid to live without, is FEAR.

I recently read a text that discussed this very topic and I felt they used a terrific example. The author, a Tibetan Master, talks about making a fist around a coin, then stretching your arm out with palm facing down.  He then says to open your hand.  What happens?  You LET GO and the coin falls to the floor.  But then he instructs you to repeat the exercise with one difference. Turn your hand so the palm is facing upward.  LET GO.  What happens?  The coin is still there.  You still have it even though you let go.  The lesson is that many of us falsely believe, or fear, that if we let go of something we inherently lose it.   Obviously that is not the case as illustrated by the second coin example.  There are other possibilities. We CAN let go and still have the coin.  Once we stop trying NOT to lose something, our fear will dissipate.   There is nothing to fear.

Letting go is all about finding out who you are not – and then having the courage to leave it at that.

Perhaps that’s what the sculptor Alberto Giacometti was trying to show us through his eerily thin statues.  He said he was not sculpting humans, but” the shadow that is cast.”  In other words, he couldn’t peel away enough layers to see the actual human, instead the shadow of the human, not the totality.

With this in mind I now recognize and ACCEPT that I will never SEE myself, the real me, and will never find out who I truly am.  All I’m capable of is removing layers that are NOT representative of who I am in an effort to whittle down my image  and get closer to who I am.   And accept that this is all I can do.