One of the things all humans crave is consistency and stability. And, or course, if you live a life outside of a cage, outside of a managed care facility, those are hard to come by.
The only constant in reality is change… constant, maddening change. As soon as you get used to a new thing… the next new thing comes…
And humans don’t adjust well to change, don’t want change, don’t like change.
Don’t do well with change…
One of my students… they may have to move back to California…
I’m flailing with my emotions at the moment and being swept away by the ever changing circumstances of my daily life. I need an anchor. Your input would be great. Thank you.
and another student, not being able to get a job:
Hi Sophie
Do we all have a purpose in our life, that when we find it or realize it, life takes off?
For me, I don’t know what my life purpose is and every time I try to move forward I get pushed back, even looking for a job.
I get discouraged a lot over here, even yesterday when I contact a company that I thought would welcome me even for free they said no. I was looking for experience.
Do I have to find my life purpose?
It is funny I was never sure about life, but now I am more confused than ever and feel dumber than ever.
Is this part of the process when we try and raise our vibration?
Thank you for all that you do.
and even the third student and the fourth where the issue came up in the Playground partner call:
Hi Sophie, our call from today. We had a question near the end whether or not our fixed attitude would go away. eg feeling slighted . I probably misheard you say we have to manage it.
What is in common in the three emails, all from this morning:
They feel like thrown about on an ocean, or sea of emotions, never any anchor. An anchor in terms of certainty.
And, my hunch, every single person deals with these same issues.
I’ll refer to Victor Frankl, famed psychiatrist, who learned what you haven’t and have seen the interesting and horrible laboratory of a concentration camp during the Holocaust: that if you had an anchor, a logos, a meaning, your chances for survival went through the roof, while if you didn’t, if you were thrown about by the circumstances, you almost certainly died.
Upon liberated, he returned to Vienna and invented Logotherapy… where he and his patients invented a big enough meaning to act as anchor. I just checked: he lived 92 years. 1
We could say that I live by his teaching, even though I have only read his most famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning.
Here are some of the principles he taught:
- When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
- Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
- Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
or here is the man himself, Victor Frankl
Find more videos
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=victor+frankl
In a Landmark Education Integrity seminar, back in 1992, there was a homework I did in earnest. It was probably the darkest year of my life.
The seminar was called Integrity. (Why did this come up in the Integrity Seminar? I guess because you cannot be true to yourself if you don’t know who you are! Right?)
And the assignment was: Find your most fundamental complaint about your life and create a purpose from it.
Now, that was very difficult for most people, because they lacked distinctions… especially the distinction of “who is speaking, who is listening?” which could be translated to “where the heck are you looking at life from?”
The default place, the default “who” considers whatever is happening in life an offense, and insult, an attack on them. Life is doing it to them, whatever that “it” is… and all they can do is complain about it.
The place of powerlessness.
From the perspective they are looking, it is accurate…
But if you can bring “power” to the question, if you can bring a different vantage point, a different “who” then the scenario changes.
Now, in this new scenario, things are happening, some of them are caused by you yourself, and now you have an experience of power… I did that.
We call the ability to say that you caused something that otherwise could be seen as happening to you, responsibility.
Interestingly, once someone reaches 200 vibration, they start to have access to responsibility and integrity: the two vantage points where you have power. Where there is the beginnings of Self.
And that is where creating a meaning, creating a purpose, creating an anchor becomes easy.
You just stand your complaint on its head, and you can see that you have power to “own” the complaint, but not as a complaint but as a purpose.
I know most of humanity isn’t at 200… but if you can see the benefit of seeing a purpose, you’ll start doing the work to claw your way up to 200… or not. You can, you know? It is only hard because you can’t see.
What can’t you see? That your self-importance, you putting yourself in every picture robs you of seeing reality.
It is that pesky “about-me” score again.
If you are not for you… who is for you?
If not now… when?
If you are only about you… who are you?
I had an abusive mother who didn’t love me. I could shake off the drama of that when I first could see, by accident, that she was a person.
That in addition to being my mother, she was a person. An old woman, who had her own failings, her own concerns, and I was very little in there…
The moment I thus turned myself into a person myself, I could feel compassion for her, and my whole world changed. I felt powerful, I felt that I could give myself what I have always hoped to get from her: love, regard, being regarded as a person.
And from that point, I had less and less things that happened to me, even though a lot of things were happening, but they weren’t happening to me.
Less and less… it’s a process. It is still a process. I am not at 7% about-me score…
In the Starting Point Measurements the higher the about-me score, the less you are able to learn, the less you are able to be well, the less you are able to see your role in what is happening… because it is all happening to you… triggering your linchpin emotion: slighted, offended, hurt, diminished, stupid, worthless, less than, not able, a weakling, forced, etc.
What an invented “meaning”, and invented “purpose” does is keep you out of the “it’s about me” swamp, morass, and allows you to have a distance between you and what is happening.
Things will always happen, in the economy, in the weather, in politics, in your family. Your child will get sick, or hate themselves. Your husband will find a new job… leave you… die. You get sick, you get fired… all kinds of things.
But if you have created an anchor, you can go “home” to it, and regain your power.
If I had to bring a life situation: there is a car and the driver loses control, and plows into the crows moving on the sidewalk.
You can be just out of its way, but the nearness of the hit makes you sick, you can’t sleep, you suddenly have PTSD. It was happening to you.
Whereas if you have a purpose, it is like you are watching it from a second story window. You get shaken up, you may feel whatever you feel vicariously, but you are OK. You remain powerful: you retain your power over your emotions and action.
If you have a purpose…
Of course you can remain a drama queen… and try to get what you want from life through other people… instead of giving it to yourself.
The more drama, the lower your vibration, and the higher is your about-me score.
But you can stop acting like a drama queen, control your delivery telling the story, and not lose your vibration to your desire for attention… The drama is not necessary, and you don’t really need anything from others.
What you really need they cannot give it to you, but you can give it to yourself.
What do you really need? Not easy to answer, is it?
Start taking notes… and then look at them, at the end of the week, at the end of the month, and stand your list on its head: OMG, I can give it to myself… And get out of the high about-me world of suffering.
PS: After I say whatever I wanted to say in an article, I always just sit and play Freecell… and pay attention. What I didn’t say, what i didn’t know to say comes out in playing that game about 50% of the time.
The game was going nowhere. I was looking for a black 8 card… and I said: 8 spades… and I caught myself.
I played as if I knew what would be the winning move. I let go of that… and I started to see other moves… and in the end I won that “going nowhere” game by allowing myself to see what I wasn’t looking for.
Just like in the Color Exercise: if you are looking for the color, you have to name it, and your cone becomes narrow, and you stop trusting the Universe. And even if you find the color, you ended up with nothing: you didn’t get the exercise.
When you actually do the Color Exercise, your cone of vision is wide, and you are in fuzzy brain state. You allow. You allow whatever is there to show up. And you trust that what will show up is what you need.
When you know what you need… you can’t.
I have clients who are looking for ways to make money, lots of money. And they don’t trust, they don’t look anywhere else, they are looking for that particular “color”.
They never find it, or if they do, it doesn’t give them what they hoped from it.
The same is with meaning/purpose. Don’t look for it. Allow it to come to you. Really…
Let go… let god.
PPS: I watched another video in which Dr. Frankl quotes a letter from a young Texan who wrote: I broke my neck. But it didn’t break me.
I sobbed for a few minutes. I have no idea why. I guess I can’t, I am not allowed to sob when I talk to people… and all that sobbing, about the broken you just came out all in a jumble.
Please find yourself through finding a meaning. I can only hold the dirt for you while you are digging for god. I cannot do it for you.
PPPS: I attempt to support students to create meaning in the Instant Coherence/Fall in love with yourself workshop.
Learn to fall in love with yourself
