Mastering the Illusion

There is a mirror that keeps being shown to me when I look around in society, particularly in politics. People get mad when I offer it, but I’m going to offer it again because until we see it, this dynamic won’t change.

For simplicity we’re going to talk about this in terms of left and right. On the left, they want mandated, free access to women’s reproductive healthcare. On the right they want to ban that access. This works with gay marriage and many other things as well.

Do you see that this is a reflection? It is the equal and the opposite reflecting back to each other.

Mandating and banning are equal and opposite constructs. They are the extreme ends of the same spectrum. The left wants to do away with the right and the right wants to do away with the left. That can’t happen because in order to have one you need the other. The spectrum will always be a spectrum. It cannot be any other way.

The left sees what the right is doing as far more intrusive. The effect of a ban seems greater than the effect of a mandate. I get that. That makes sense. I understand why it’s seen that way, it’s just not a true story. All it does is perpetuate the argument.

The right wants to do away with the mandate. The left says, “it doesn’t affect you”. The existence of a mandate is the thing they are wanting to get rid of. It does affect them as long as the mandate exists because they see the mandate as the problem they need to fix. The reverse is also true. The ban affects those who want access for as long as the ban exists. They are equal and opposite constructs.

The fight is not about participating or not participating in something. The fight is over the simple existence of it as a thing in itself. If the fight was about simple participation then the existence of the thing would not be an issue. We wouldn’t even be having this discussion.

We need to change the discussion. Telling people that it doesn’t affect them because they don’t have to participate in it, doesn’t solve the problem. The existence of it does affect them. The left doesn’t believe that argument because it doesn’t appear as though the existence of something would be a problem.

Let’s think of it this way. When a hurricane happens somewhere, are you bothered by it even though the hurricane didn’t hit your house? If there’s a war somewhere else, are you bothered by it even though there is no war where you live? When there’s a school shooting, are you bothered by it even though it wasn’t your kid or your kids’ school or maybe you don’t even have children? Are you bothered by how other countries are run, even though you don’t live in those countries? Are you bothered by poverty even though you’re not poor? Are you bothered by homelessness even though you have a home? How many things in the world do you take on and become bothered by even though 99% of it doesn’t affect you at all?

The existence of these things bothers you and you want them to change. You make that argument okay all the time. But then when the existence of women’s reproductive rights or gay marriage comes up, you refuse to acknowledge that the existence of something can be a problem even though you engage in that exact argument all the time.

I want to be very clear here. I’m not arguing morality with you. I’m not arguing for or against mandating or banning anything. I’m trying to show you the argument. I want you to see the argument you have and the problem with what’s happening. Neither side can fully get to where they want to go doing what they are doing.

You don’t get to decide what bothers people. You don’t get to decide that it doesn’t apply or it doesn’t affect them or it doesn’t matter or it’s not the same. It’s not under your control. It’s not yours to decide. These things are having an effect whether you think they should or not. They are all equal and opposite and until we see that we’re going to continue to go around in this loop.

The argument needs to change. The left is being hypocritical and the right is being stubborn. Neither side will win like that.

Something needs to change and I would suggest we start with the topic of the discussion we’re having.

Love to all.

Della

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There is something that happens when we contemplate the unknown or even partially known future – we question our power to control it. We question the risk to ourselves. And then we try to find ways to get some control over things.

When I first started healing, I intuitively understood that one of the intentions of my path was to make me “fearless” in many ways. I would no longer be scared of my experience – past, present, or future. That’s happened. I’m not scared of nothing anymore. But what I didn’t expect was that life would offer me cliffs with no safety nets, with the very unique expectation that I would simply dive in head first and not really think about it or worry about it too much, that I wouldn’t change direction because of it.

When the unknown future presents the possibility that there may be some cliff jumping involved, that often changes the path people take. They go in a different direction because of the perception of risk that comes into play. I don’t think that most people have a healing journey that includes becoming fearless in this way. But, if they did, it would be life-changing for them. Or maybe they do and they just avoid it the entire time because of the fear of it.

So many people give up on their dreams because of the fear of “what if”, because of the fear of the cliff with no safety net. Often that presents as a choice between money and happiness. I can do what I want and be happy, but I’ll probably be broke. Or I can get a job that I don’t like and give up being happy, but at least I’ll have money in the bank. The world offers this false choice all the time.

Really, the question is only – how fearless are you? How much risk can you tolerate? How much mental and emotional control over yourself do you have in the experience?

Master yourself in the experience without changing the experience.

When you’re faced with that perceived risk or that false choice, aka the cliff jump, to allow the experience to move forward you have to be able to manage yourself in the experience without trying to change the experience or the direction you’re going in. You have to be willing to jump. You can’t avoid the cliff. That’s no easy feat.

Fear is going to tell you a story about all the things that could go wrong. Potentially you also have people around you that are projecting their own fear at you. You have all of that happening while you’re trying to talk yourself into jumping off a cliff without knowing what will happen next.

Do accept the challenge? Can you manage yourself within that experience in such a way that you don’t cave into the fear of others? Can you stay the course?

I’ve personally had a lot of practice at this. Life offered it to me in spades over and over again. I sat in the fear, waited for the experience to pass, and then looked around and questioned what happened. Am I still here? Any broken bones? What actually happened? How far off was the experience from what I was afraid of in my head? Did it work out? Was the story of the mind true? Where would I be if I hadn’t done it the way I did it?

Let’s be real for a second – it’s not always going to work out. You can jump off the cliff and hit the rocks. That means you have to be able to do one thing – trust yourself to handle what happens next. If you trust yourself, then it doesn’t matter what life throws at you, you’ll be okay.

You can manage yourself within the experience because you trust yourself to handle the experience.

You don’t need to change the experience because you trust yourself to handle it and you understand that you don’t have control over it anyway.

All you do is manage your thoughts and feelings – self-mastery is internal power and control not external power and control.

Your point of control is always within yourself. It’s not out there in the world.

These are the fundamental things that allow you to accept the unknown future and keep going anyway. Learn to recognize the fear when it shows up.

How do you do that? Question the story you’re telling yourself? What’s the root cause of the feeling you’re having?

You see, I’ve been feeling a bit like I’m burnt out. But it’s not really burn out. That feeling turned into a bit of frustration. Then as I continued to question that, I realized I was offering myself the false choice between money and happiness. Then as I continued to question that I understood that it was my fear of the partially known and unknown future that was actually getting my way.

If you stay there, you don’t argue with it, you don’t force it, and you just keep trying to understand it, eventually you will find the truth of the story you’re telling yourself.

Crying it out doesn’t work. Wallowing in it doesn’t work. Acceptance allows you to question it so you don’t fight with it. When you don’t fight with it, that gives you the ability to do the work to understand it. Once you understand it then you can offer yourself the ability to work through the fear. That allows you to deal with whatever the insecurity is that you’re feeling. Now you can stay the course.

Me and fear are friends. It likes to remind me that it’s hanging out back there sometimes because it wants to be acknowledged. I’m okay with that. So when it comes out of the shadows to play, I go along with it. I play with the fear. Some people call it playing with fire. For me, it’s just playing cards with an old friend.

Fear will always be part of the experience. We’re not trying to evict it. We’re learning how to work with it. By learning how to work with it, we learn to accept that it will be present, that it will show up in disguise, and that we can manage it when we realize what it is and why it’s there.

The thing we don’t do is try to change the experience. When we question the experience it just offers us the fear back. That’s the reflection of the experience until we can see the fear in the reflection. Remember that fun house mirror? Well, here it is. This is an example of the warped reflection we get when we haven’t done in our own internal questioning before we look out into the world. To see the world clearly, you have to clarify your own perception before you look around, otherwise what you get back will be warped.

The unknown future only presents a problem because of the fear of it. Just recognize your own ability to manage your fear. You don’t have to be scared of what might happen next. You just have to trust yourself.

How do you do that? Take a few leaps and see how you manage them. Allow life to happen and see how you handle it. Do that without running the story that says things need to work out the way I want them to in order for me to trust myself because that story isn’t true. It makes the experience responsible for how you feel about yourself. That’s a great way to feel like crap on a regular basis.

Life isn’t going to always work out the way you want it to. You can’t control that so you have to find a way to trust yourself to handle what happens next without hinging that on a given outcome. That separates you from the experience just enough that you don’t beat yourself up for what’s happening around you. Taking responsibility for your life doesn’t mean having control over everything nor does it mean beating yourself up for what you don’t have control over.

Learning to trust yourself to handle an unknown future isn’t easy. Step one is recognizing the fear of that unknown future and the story it creates. Manage the story then release the fear. That will allow you to see the world more clearly, while learning to stay the course so that you can keep following your heart, knowing you’re taking your brain with you.

Love to all.

Della

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Imagine the teeter totter is the degrees of pain and happiness in the world. On one side is the degrees of pain, the center of the teeter totter is the neutral point, and then on the other side is the degrees of good or happy. The teeter totter now resembles the spectrum of experience and emotion we have as human beings.

Now imagine we lived in a world where we were able to remove the degrees of pain we experience. Imagine the teeter totter was now a ramp that ended at the neutral point in the middle. What would happen? The assumption is that the pain would simply go away and nobody would experience that emotion anymore. But is that true?

From where we are now, given our current experience, the removal of pain seems like a really good thing. It would offer a lot of relief to a lot of people in the moment. What happens over time though, as that reference point starts to fade into the background?

Slowly as people stopped having the same reference points for pain that we have now, the neutral point or center point of the teeter totter would start to slide toward the middle of what is left of the teeter totter. Pain would still be felt. The only thing that would change is the type of experiences that offer the pain. Eventually, the neutral point would once again find the middle of the teeter totter and the same degrees of pain would be felt. The only thing that will have changed are the experiences that cause the pain.

From our perspective now, that still seems like a good thing. A less extreme experience still seems better, even if the emotion remains the same. Can you see that as a trick of perception?

The only reason we can see it that way is because we have a different reference point. Without that reference point, we would still feel the same pain and the same stuckness. We would still tell the same stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization. The need for help with the pain would still exist.

The trick of perception is that it is an improvement because the extremes are seemingly less extreme. Maybe if we move the center point toward the good enough times, the pain eventually goes away. But that’s not true. People will always feel pain. It’s a natural human emotion. The only difference is that now instead of the extremes of the experience being abuse, violence, and war, suddenly a bad at work will cause the same extreme degree of pain that war does now. That sounds nuts doesn’t it? But that’s only because you have a reference point for something you perceive to be far worse than a bad day at work.

You see, it’s perception not experience, that determines how you feel. Regardless of whether we are able to change the types of experiences that people have or not, the emotions will continue to be felt. If they don’t have a different reference point, than the extremes of emotion will be used to react to the experiences they have available to them, regardless of what those experiences are.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Have you ever heard that saying? What does it mean?

The feeling of pain is what allows us to perceive things as “broken”, needing attention, or needing to be changed. Without the perception of pain, nothing would ever be perceived as “broken” and nobody would ever change anything. It would offer a high degree of complacency.

We have a mentality in society that says if it’s not bothering you, don’t mess with it. Don’t stir the pot. Don’t create problems. Just leave it there until it causes pain. That mentality is the exact reason why we need pain. It shows us what needs fixing. It shows us what needs to change. It shows us where the problems are.

I wouldn’t be here without pain. You wouldn’t be reading this without pain. We wouldn’t be talking about this stuff without pain. You wouldn’t have left your last job without pain or moved without pain or left your last relationship with pain or bought that new toaster without pain. You perceived the toaster as broken and so you replaced it. If you never perceived it as broken, even if stopped working, you’d never replace it. Pain is what offers you the ability to see the non-working toaster as something that needs to be replaced. Pain shifts you perception. If there is no pain, then there is no need to replace it even if it is broken.

That’s the power of perception. It tricks us into thinking that things would be different if certain experiences didn’t exist. It’s only because we have a reference point that makes it look like an improvement. But without that reference point, there would be no perception of improvement so it wouldn’t matter.

Our need for things to be different than they are comes from our ability to compare experiences with each other. That’s why I strongly encourage people to avoid doing that to themselves. Stop looking for those connections. Stop offering yourself the comparison because it doesn’t help you.

If things could be different they would be. That’s a concept Matt Kahn offers regularly. The idea is that we learn because of the experience being the way it is. Remember that quote, “if ain’t broke don’t fix it”? Well, that’s the mentality that we have. That’s why we need those experiences because we won’t change anything without them. If we would change things when they were good, then we wouldn’t need so much bad.

We don’t like to go to the doctor when we’re healthy. Doctors keep trying to encourage preventative care. People don’t like that and they don’t do it. We’re not going to go see the doctor until it hurts. We need the pain to do something differently. For some of us, we need to have our guts hanging out of us before we’ll go to the doctor.

Here comes my favorite question!

How much pain do you need to be in before you do something differently?

Do you need to have your guts hanging out of you? Does it just need to be a bit sore? Or are you willing to be proactive and see the doctor before the pain happens at all?

If you’re doing anything but being proactive, then you’re one of the many that avoids dealing with things until there is a perception of pain. It has absolutely nothing to do with what the experience is. It has everything to do with how you perceive it and your perception has to include pain before you’re willing to do anything about it.

That’s why we need pain because that’s the only way we avoid complacency. That’s the only way things change. That’s the only way evolution happens.

Humans don’t move without pain which also means evolution can’t happen without pain. Whether we like it or not, we’re a lazy bunch and we refuse to evolve unless there is enough pain present to make it worth while.

Are there situations where people just get comfortable with the pain and stay there anyway? Yes. That happens too. Why does that happen? That’s all about the stories people tell about the pain they experience. It’s a feeling of being trapped in the experience, whether the trap is real or perceived. Sometimes we stay in the pain to try to avoid more pain, so that even if it is broken I’m not going to fix it because I’m scared of what happens next.

It all comes back to my question from earlier. How much pain do you need to be in before you do something different? This, whether it’s good or bad, right or wrong, is how we evolve. Pain is the thing that keeps us going or should I say, the avoidance of this is often what keeps us going because that’s what creates the impetus to change anything at all.

Pain is a necessary part of our experience.

It’s not about the experience. It’s all about our perception of it.

If we simply stop trying to change the experience and instead manage our perceptions of things, life gets easier. We stop needing to control the experience or change it in some way and instead simply accept what needs to happen next as a result of our ability to see the experience for what it is – part of the evolutionary process.

Keep going. Keep growing. Keep moving forward.

Love to all.

Della

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