Monthly Archives: January 2008
Yours For The Basking
Why is it that the most thrilling, most exhilarating, most delightful experiences that show up in our lives . . . the experiences that feel like direct answers to our prayers, astonishingly perfect replies from the Universe to something we’ve been asking for . . . often become the source of such stress or worry?
I’ve been hearing phrases like “looking a gift horse in the mouth” or “borrowing trouble” or “waiting for the other shoe to drop” for most of my life. But lately I’ve been recognizing in particularly powerful ways how much I am guilty of doubting or questioning or otherwise refusing to let myself just enjoy the incomparable gifts of the Universe when they are offered to me.
I notice how often I start to scrutinize something wonderful that has come my way. I start to ‘think’ about it and to put it under a microscope to see what it’s made of or what makes it tick. I will start compiling a list of questions, or I will begin to weigh it against some pre-existing list of criteria . . . Or I might just simply stand back, tapping my foot, and waiting for the less than lovely or lovable ‘truth’ to reveal itself.
In other words, I find ways to sabotage my joy. I introduce doubt into the equation and it immediately starts to snowball, and before you know it . . . I’ve neatly fulfilled my self-fulfilling prophecy and the inherent problems that I was so diligently looking for begin to appear like clockwork.
So I asked The Shower Team . . . Why do I seem so compelled to go looking for the worm in the beautiful apple? Why am I so driven to find the trouble lurking in the shadows of even the brightest blessing that shows up at my door?
Perhaps the easiest or clearest way that we can respond to this question is to say that the reason you so often experience this “other shoe” dropping—and therefore start to expect it—is because you’ve really got the whole happiness and hardship business completely backwards.
You train yourselves—rather unintentionally of course—to view hardship or suffering or difficulty or struggle as the normal course of things—and happiness you tend to view as a fluke or an anomaly or some glitch in the natural order. Even those among you who claim to be “optimists” are still guilty of buying into the view that your life experience is, by some cosmic or “Divine” mandate, ordained to be an arbitrary mix of what you perceive to be “good” or “bad”.
Fresh from the womb you begin hearing the hype about how life is hard, work is hard, relationships are hard . . . anything worth having is hard . . . rewards only come to those who try really hard. It’s no wonder you find it so HARD to believe that anything worthwhile or anything truly wonderful can only come about through hard effort, that there can be no gain without pain.
It’s a wonder you ever give yourselves a minute of peace or joy considering the degree and frequency with which you are always on standby, waiting for the bad news, waiting for things to go wrong, waiting for the good times to pass, waiting for the other side of the coin . . . your list of ways for describing this expectation is nearly endless.
You’ve convinced yourselves that the law of the Universe is one of equal parts (if you’re lucky) good and bad, equal parts happy and sad, equal parts ease and hardship . . . You’ve so bought into the notion that things cannot be wonderful for long, that things cannot keep getting better and better, that you cannot receive something wonderful without it costing you something . . . that it is extremely difficult for you to entertain any other way of looking at things.
And so, you continue on your way, believing, expecting—and therefore receiving—your mixed bag of goodies . . . your wormy apples, your up-and-down life experiences . . . and with each one, you nod your heads and agree together that this is just the way it is on Planet Earth and the best we can do is try to console each other and wait for the next upswing.
There is, in fact, nothing terribly wrong with that approach. Even with that mixed message you are sending the Universe and the mixed results you are receiving in return, things still go amazing well for you overall. And the ‘worst’ thing—for most of you—is that you die and pass back into pure bliss. Hardly an unhappy ending to your current experience.
But we would offer to you that there is an easier way. There is a way that you can tip the odds in your favor . . . a way that you can start to skew your life experience toward the happy and the joyful and the easy and the delightful. There is a way that you can begin to create more and more good stuff and invite less and less of what you consider to be bad.
It’s really rather simple—you just start upping the enjoyment. You know how to do this. All of you have moments now and then when something fabulous has come your way. You got a piece of rip-roaring good news. You got a promotion or an award or a raise or a new mate or a new toy or a new friend . . . Something awesome happened to you and you just couldn’t get enough of thinking about it. So you replayed it over and over in your mind. You relived the details, you rewound the tape and played it again and again. You let yourself enjoy that experience repeatedly and you loved every extended minute of it.
You know how to prolong your joy. You know how to keep giving yourself good feelings by virtue of your attention to the thoughts that give rise to them. You know how to take your mind off whatever is not so hot in your daily experience and to turn it toward something that really floats your boat. And as you continue to do this . . . with more and more situations, more and more often, with more and more abandon and shameless pleasure coming from the sheer savoring of something sweet that you’ve tasted . . . you are in effect, rewiring yourself to receive more of that sweet- tasting abundance from the Universe. You are in effect teaching yourself how to feel better and better and as you feel better and better you are opening yourself up to more and more of what makes you feel better and better and you are in effect rewriting the script that you’ve learned and practiced and the new script is one where you get to have not one, not two or three but unlimited happy endings.
You can choose to continue seeing your life experience as a series of random, some-happy, some-sad events, all following some higher power’s presumably wiser direction . . . You can choose to see yourselves as fated to fall as often as you stand, to fail as often as your succeed, to cry out in pain or sorrow as often as you rejoice . . . That’s your choice. But you have other choices available to you—and in the making of those other choices, you have other perspectives and other kinds of life experiences available to you.
You can keep your sorrows coming because you believe them to be inevitable. Or you can test those waters and by savoring and prolonging and reliving and recreating and even insisting upon better and better, happier and happier, sweeter and sweeter experiences . . . you can astonish yourself with the extent to which the Universe is waiting to deliver to you untold, unimagined, and unconditional bliss to you—even before you kick the bucket. Just as the sorrows, the disappointments, the failures, the losses, the letdowns are yours for the asking . . . the delights, the surprises, the unspeakably exhilarating joys and satisfactions are yours for the basking.
I haven’t come this close to bursting into a refrain of the “Hallelujah Chorus” since I lost my virginity. And that was followed by such a self-imposed stab of guilt that it only seems to prove the Team’s point here.
As a writer and a poet in particular, I have embraced as much or more than anyone the view that our lives are by nature or by definition or by decree, an avoidable, unpredictable mix of ups and downs, highs and lows, good and bads. And as I sit with the message from The Team, I don’t so much hear them saying that the variety or contrast of our life experiences is ‘bad’ . . . only that we have far more say in how it all goes than we let ourselves believe.
I love basking. I can keep myself on cloud nine for days at a time just by reliving some particularly fine moment that made me feel oh so good to be me. If by giving myself more of those moments, I can literally create more of those moments—and in some measure at least, minimize or modify my belief that those moments must eventually flip flop into something that hurts . . . what a gift I’ve given me.
It seems there’s very little to lose by giving basking more air time. Who knows how impressively free of hardship my life could become. I’m already jealous of the happier me I could be—and that leaves me feeling like wallowing in my satisfaction for a while longer—and for the moment, complete.
Navigating Dire Straits
A very good friend of mine going through a very rough time got in touch with me recently, asking me what I would do if I were faced with the same rather desperate choices seemingly facing him. His situation was pretty dire by anyone’s standards and there didn’t seem to be an option open to him that wasn’t bleak at best. Some of the possibilities he mentioned were pretty scary, and I honestly wasn’t sure what I would do if I were faced with the same set of apparently awful choices.
So I asked The Team, on his behalf and out of my own curiosity about what we can do when everywhere we look, we only see bad news. Do desperate times call for desperate measures? It is understandable that when you find yourself in a set of circumstances in your life experience where there appear to be no real options for an outcome that pleases you, where every condition that you are observing feels oppressive or disheartening or desperate or painful, that you would begin to act out of your sense of desperation in order to bring your immediate fear or pain to as quick a conclusion as possible. We understand the rock and a hard place that you often feel when you are in the midst of the most terrifying or disturbing or difficult of your life experiences. We also understand how you come to hold the perspective that there are no alternatives other than the sort of desperate actions that seem to be available to you. When you are looking at these kinds of conditions strictly from your limited, physical perspective, it can be extremely hard to find the broader view of things–that is, to see what is taking place in your life experience as something that you created, something that is temporary, something that you can always–ALWAYS–find your way out of as you begin to remember who You really are and the power that is available to you through your ability to control the direction of your thought. But what we most want you to understand about this or any other condition that you are observing in your physical experience is that you are never without choices. You are never without options that can serve you and that can call you back to the fuller understanding of your true Self and the freedom that is yours when you choose to see it and to base your decisions upon it. No matter what your circumstances–circumstances, by the way, that are always a result of the vibration that you have been offering–you can begin to choose your perspective in a way that offers you relief. You can begin to look at where you are and say, “I am where I am” and no matter how I got here and no matter how awful being here seems to me, I can move from here in the direction of where I want to be. I can begin from this place where I stand, to choose thoughts that feel better to me and as I begin to care more about how I feel than I care about any of the current circumstances of my life . . . as I begin to focus more on feeling better about myself and my life–regardless of the immediate conditions of my life . . . then I can begin to feel better about myself and as I feel better about myself I can begin to experience the incredible freedom that I always have to decide my point of view about anything I am observing. By choosing what I give my attention to, I can control the direction of my thoughts and by controlling the direction of my thoughts I can begin to influence what comes into my life experience . . . and I begin to create a life experience that is more pleasing and more aligned with my desires. There is no ‘wrong’ choice to be made in this or any situation except those choices that do not match or align with what your heart desires. But you can take a limited view of your choices to the point where you do not see the real freedom and power you have to create your life experience in more and more pleasing ways–regardless of any circumstances that you might be facing where you stand. The choice is always yours: What will I look at here? What will I focus on?
You can decide to look only at the difficulty or struggle or challenge in front of you . . . or you can just as stubbornly choose to see things from your broader nonphysical perspective where you understand that no circumstance, no situation, no horror or setback or trauma is permanent. And in fact, you have a great deal of power over just how temporary any of those conditions can be.
You can begin right now, to decide that your life is not the conditions you are observing, that you are not the victim of circumstances or the victim of others’ decisions or actions. You can decide . . . “I did this somehow and I can just as easily undo it by beginning to choose to care more about how I feel than I care about anything going on in my current life experience.”
As you decide that feeling better is more important to you than being ‘right’ or being vindicated or being rescued. . . as you decide that you truly are free . . . even free to choose pain or bondage, then you can begin to exercise your freedom. . . which is the freedom to decide how you are going to feel at any point in time. That is power no one can take from you. That is freedom no one can deprive you of.
You get to choose who is in control of your life experience. You and only you decide who dictates to you the nature of that life experience. That freedom begins with your decision that you are the master of your perspective and you are the one deciding where
your focus will be–and therefore what will continue to come and to expand in your life experience.
Ask yourself what it is that calls to you. Ask yourself who you really are and what you really wants. Reach for the relief that is available to you when you choose the thoughts that feel better for you. Let your action–any action you take–be inspired by the deepest and most compelling desires of your heart. When you begin to see, again, who you really are, and to respond to your life experience from that place of knowing, then nothing is ever desperate or hopeless or insurmountable.
You are never at the mercy of anyone else or any set of conditions. You are free in ways that no one can interfere with or control. Let that freedom and its constant availability to you be the life giving force that flows through you and that carries you forward into the life of joy and satisfaction that is always–ALWAYS–available to you.
I’ve never felt as desperate as my friend was feeling when he asked what I would do if I were him. I realized, in fact, as I was contemplating his question that I could never really know what I would do if I were him, living his life from his point of view.
But I do remember times when I’ve felt that my life offered me no real options—no choice that felt like a happy or desirable one, no promise of freedom or joy that I could see. What is most interesting about that to me now, however, is the perspective that I have about it standing in my here and now, looking back. For what I see so clearly now is how the perspective that I held about my situation then is exactly what was perpetuating the misery I was experiencing. I can even remember some of the exact moments when my perspective changed enough for me to begin to let hope or the possibility of happiness back in.
I hope that my friend will find his way to a point of view where he can see more than the desperate feeling situation that he’s been looking at. I remember the sweet rush of relief, the recognition that the bleak landscape of my life that I had been convinced was my only view . . . was actually one of many.
There was a time in my life when I remember thinking that I had only two choices: life or death, and that the choice was entirely mine. In that respect, perhaps not much has changed, except my point of view. But it’s a point of view that offers a much brighter horizon, a much lovelier landscape that the one I remember thinking was my only option.
Knowing that at any time, no matter what the circumstances, no matter how deep the pit of pain I’ve managed to dig for myself . . . I can choose to see that well being really does abound . . . leaves me with more hope and more peace than I possibly begin to describe . . . and that leaves me feeling light years away from the bleak landscapes of the past—in a place and with a perspective that feels ever so much more complete.
