Podcast: Play in new window | Download
What does it mean feeling lost?
When you don’t feel at home in your body, when your feelings, your thoughts pull you out of yourself, you have a sense that you are, somehow, lost in the shuffle. That you don’t have any say in the matter of your life, what you feel, what you do, what you say…
You feel you are put on a roller coaster, and it wasn’t you who put you there…
How did it happen and what can you do about it? How can you find your way back home, to your own self? this is what this article is about.
If you are like most of my readers: you don’t feel well. Too much activity in the mind, you listen from what you know, and you have negative emotions that you resist, suppress, fight, argue with, avoid, run from. You have urges you succumb to. You are in forceful resistance mode.
The double whammy of forceful resistance
Not surprisingly, with this resistance mode comes another commonality: you don’t know what you are about, you don’t know where you want to take your life.
Why? Because you can’t resist something with all your might and keep what you resist in the same view as the place you are going to. They are mutually exclusive, can’t co-exist in the same view.
For clarification: everything you try to fix you resist
Although this is true in the big picture, it is even more true on a moment to moment basis: in the moment of struggle, resistance, wanting to get away from something, wanting to do away with something, your attention is all occupied with that “monster” something you so don’t want… and the boat of your life is stalled, thrown about by waves, aimlessly, out on sea.
- There are solutions to fight off or tame the thoughts and the feelings.
- There are solutions and strategies to take your life someplace worth taking it…
…but unless these are a team working synergisticly, both systems, both solutions are doomed to fail.
Which comes first? Direction or tools?
In my humble opinion, in my experience, setting the direction that needs to be done first. This creates the context, the largest envelope, inside synergy can be created.
I have students who have been with me for a long time, and although they come to classes, they try to do everything we do in class, they have never completely taken responsibility, declared ownership, declared themselves captains of their own life.
And, not surprisingly, their life remains a boat lost at sea… and the effectiveness of any of the technology I teach is lost on them: becomes mind-stuff, tree of knowledge, bragging rights, but not the stuff of Life.
Why? Because until they set a direction for their lives, nothing else can work.
Simple enough, right? Set a direction and then practice, moment to moment, freeing yourself from the activity of the machine, the inescapable machine that runs humans: the incessantly talking mind, the emotions, the feelings, the reactions, the urge to fix, the urge to blame, the urge to win every battle, the urge for immediate gratification, the urge to stay the same, the urge to stay out of life.
We could say, that as long as you are busy trying to beat the machine, you are lost, you are miserable, your life cannot go anywhere… You are still in the waiting room, waiting to begin your life, waiting to do something worthwhile with it.
The Waiting Room
The Waiting Room is the place where you are in a state of hope: Acting confident is turned into waiting until you feel confident. Waiting for the fear to go away. Waiting for something to happen… never ever making things happen.
Level 5 of the Brilliance at Will Course
I am working on the Level 5 of the Brilliance at Will course: the level where you get all the tools you’ll ever need to ride the machine to a life worth living. Tools to manage yourself inside the machine, manage yourself so you can be free inside the machine.
There is no getting rid of the machine: the machine is part of being human, just like your body is a machine that you can’t get rid of.
But if you know the machine, then you can have a great life, even though the machine didn’t change. Did you catch that I didn’t say: Know ABOUT the machine?
The machine won’t ever change!
It may seem that others have a better machine, an easier machine, a looser machine… But the truth is: some ride it skillfully, others ride it poorly, and yet others allow the machine to eat up their lives.
But, here is the big “but”: unless first you set a direction to your life, unless first you attempt to move in that direction, unless there is a real hunger to move in the direction you have chosen, I will NOT give you the tools, because they are wasted on you, like everything I have taught has been wasted on those students I’ve mentioned earlier.
Using the tools to feel better on your rudderless boat out at sea is the booby prize.
If your life is about feeling better, then my tools won’t work well for you! Drugs will do much better for that!
Just knowing ABOUT the direction won’t be enough
Let me use a student as an example: she has come to the Itch, Level 4 of the Brilliance at Will course, where we define and start practicing, where we make it real, the direction we are most likely to be happiest moving our lives. The direction that will give us the most energy back to deal with the machine.
In fact, she was the first person to take that level. For me, the session was a piece of cake: I saw her Itch in minutes… and then the unimaginable happened: she started to argue, to resist, to fight me.
This was about a month ago.
What’s in the way when you can’t or won’t decide on a direction?
I have found two things in the way:
- arrogance
- fear
Arrogance is a coverup for fear. Fear always comes with another word after it: fear of something. Even when we don’t know what we are afraid of, there is a thing we are afraid of, we just have suppressed the knowledge of it.
What can you be afraid of?
- You can be afraid, that you are not good enough, not as good as you hoped you’d be by now.
- Fear that you will get hurt
- Fear that you will be judged
- Fear that you’ll find out something about yourself you won’t like
- Fear that you are too weak, too stupid, too slow to meet the challenge of life
- Fear that someone will say something about you
- Fear that you’ll be left alone
- Fear that you will never amount to anything…
- and the list goes on.
You are never afraid in the moment.
If you stood on the road and a truck came at you, you would not be afraid. You would jump out of the way. No fear! Action.
Fear is the unwillingness to take action, fear is thinking of a future that will, probably, never happen. Fear is a justification for not moving, for not acting, for not even trying.
Because fear deals with a future, fear is all mind based. It is the mind’s habit to go to the future, go to the past, but be completely ignorant about the present. Your effective actions in the present NEVER come from the mind… and if that is so, mind-learning is a waste of time!
Knowing things that are useless: that is the age we live in. I call that ‘Tree of Knowledge’
So, we can see, that as long as this student will honor mind, she will never be able to honor direction. It’s either one or the other. Her mind blocks her from even seeing that the direction will give her everything she ever wanted. But, of course, it is outside of the machine…
…the job is to take the machine there, not to get out of the machine and leave it behind. Why? Because it is not possible.
OK, I can see that I am painting a grim, glum, hopeless future here, but don’t despair:
Taking control of your life is a little by little, inch by inch, gradient by gradient phenomenon.
I know that others promise you push-button solutions: meditate and then all will be well. Take this pill and all will be well. Just exercise and all will be well. Just let me clear your chakras and all will be well. Clear your negativity… energize you this or that… and all will be well.
It will not be all well until
- until you learn to live freely in the machine without interfering with its operation
- until you learn to take your machine, willingly, to a direction of your choosing
- until you set a direction for you to take your life towards.
So how do you learn to do all that?
Every program worth its salt emphasizes setting a goal or a direction. And they do well for the people who are skillful at managing themselves inside their machine.
What I am attempting to do here is to do both. Why? Because this is the only way to take someone from being suffering effect, from suffering “because,” from suffering human, to a glorious expanding Human Being.
There is a Great Divide… and on your side of the Great Divide there is fleeting happiness, fleeting joy, fleeting satisfaction. So, if you want happiness, joy, satisfaction as the main ingredients of your life nut just a rare event, you need to cross the Great Divide.
The tools are above, but let me repeat them:
- you learn to live freely in the machine without interfering with its operation
- you learn to take your machine, willingly, to a direction of your choosing
- you set a direction for you to take your life towards.
To the degree you are WILLING to get out of your mind, to the same degree I can work with you successfully.
One tool that has been successful at destroying the fixed view of yourself and of the world, (all mind stuff,) is the Playground. It uses a simple method: you speak about things not the way you always speak about them. Just by using a different way of speaking, the solidness, the view of your self and the view of the world becomes malleable, not fixed and rigid, and you become able to look at things, events, yourself, differently.
Some people do better than others? Are they smarter?
Some do better than others. Why? Because some has more investment in how they view themselves than others. Arrogance is a big issue. Stinginess is another big issue.
It takes longer to tame people that are arrogant or stingy… but even they can be tamed…
Returning to the student that has a hard time setting direction: she is now, supposedly, dealing with her arrogance. Unless! Unless the mind proves it to her that she is not arrogant. That I am the arrogant one… not her. Then the mind wins. And with that misery wins. Directionlessness wins. Being lost wins. A life not worth living wins.
PS: The role of language
In another article I shared that Chinese and Mongolian are more likely to take to the idea that they can move the machine, while they live inside it.
Although I don’t know any Chinese and any Mongolian, I have a hunch.
This (fear of a future, fear of consequences) is a language issue. Language defines culture. To the degree a the language supports “whatif” ideas, to the same degree fear, trepidation, and anxiety will rule the people.
To the degree the culture supports living a life lived with direction and meaning, to the degree the people of that culture will take to setting and following a direction: and being willing to take their machine with them.
When I muscletest certain cultures (it is not genetic, it is all language based!) some cultures are able to use more of their brain to move, because they use less of the brain to fantasize about imaginary scenarios of danger.
But what if you were born into a culture that is all about painting pictures and scenarios that don’t exist and probably never will?
All selling, all promotion, all advertising is painting scenarios that don’t exist. So are promises, hope, faith… the invisible evils
The picture of hell, the picture of heaven…
The more you expose yourself to that, the more suffering, the more anxiety you’ll experience.
Why? Because it makes the mind go to the future too readily. So, turn away from advertising, turn away from promotions, turn away from Facebook, to the degree that you are willing… and start anchoring yourself in the here and now, and you’ll find that nothing is missing: you have everything that you need in the here and now.
That will calm you down enough that I can work with you, and start taking you through the steps of becoming someone who can be with anything, let it be feelings, emotions, or thoughts. Even the weather… lol.
When you don’t know what you are about, you are lost… so find out!
This is where most people are. Having goals, having dreams, having high aspirations is not empowering. An empowering context is really more like the North Star… it applies to every area of your life. It doesn’t make you arrogant, and it doesn’t make you feel like a loser. It is, instead, empowering: handing power for you to use. Heavenly. Empowering context is entirely on the Vertical Plan, aka the Creative Plane. Goals, dreams, desires are on the horizontal plane, the plane of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Learn to create an empowering context
