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A Healthy Man Wants a Thousand Things; a Sick Man Only Wants One
If you feel imprisoned, you want freedom…
But if you don’t feel it, even though you are imprisoned, you’ll want many things. And won’t even think of wanting freedom.
You don’t know what’s missing
You will maybe feel some lack, some no joy, no satisfaction, but you won’t know what is missing. So you’ll want everything.
- You’ll buy all my courses and have no results.
- You’ll start many projects, but will produce no joy.
Because you don’t know what is missing.
I remember when I first defined for myself what freedom felt like for me. I saw the last few minutes of the movie Harold and Maud in my mind, where Harold junks his car and then jauntily skips up the hill, playing his ukulele.
Yeah, that is it. Two steps:
- junking what’s defined you and your life, and then
- doing something joyous that wouldn’t have fitted into your life before.
A number of years ago I participated in Landmark Education’s Wisdom Course.
The Autobiography
One component of that course was to create a book of your life, the autobiography. In it you dedicated a page to each year. So if you were 52 years old, you’d have 52 pages.
The pages would have pictures, names of people in your life at the time, and some typical attitudes you had for life, yourself, and others.
I didn’t have many pictures. Why? because I left everything behind when I left Hungary. But my younger brother sent me some pictures of myself. I was laughing on most of them. Not smiling. Laughing.
My memory, my own experience of myself was that I was unhappy. Deeply unhappy.
I then I got a video of my high school graduation, and the person I saw there was gloomy, like Gloomy Sunday. That is the person I remembered inside and out. Not happy.
The secret of going from wherever you are all the way to heaven
When I look, the secret of going from wherever you are all the way to heaven is…
…to be present to what’s between you and happiness, what’s between you and fulfillment, what’s between you and loving yourself , loving your life.
What was and still is between me and full-on happiness, full-on fulfillment, full-on love is words.
WORDS. Words I say and words I don’t.
Huh? lol.
Yeah.
I think the real turning point for me was when I read this Hungarian engineer’s books, Feelings and Words.
Even after participating in Landmark Educations courses, seminars, training programs, assisting programs, being trained to be a leader, a Forum Leader even. I never actually heard it said: everything you feel is words first, feelings second. Or at most: they arise the same moment like clapping your hands. The sound and the touch arise at the same time.
Example: I am lying in bed, awake, not sure why I woke up. It takes me minutes to realize that I have to pee. But until I realize it, even though it is clear that I can’t sleep, so I don’t move… Yeah, even bodily feelings don’t register until you have words… meaning.
And whether you hear what the words say or not, all you feel, about yourself, about life, about the situation you are in, about food, about people, about politics, about sex, about everything is first words, and then feelings.
I used to call it the backdrop.
A backdrop is a large canvas hanging behind a scene in a photographer’s studio, or a movie studio. It sets the context of the scene. The backdrop and the music is what makes a movie scene terrifying, or suspenseful, or thought provoking, romantic, or happy.
Without a backdrop and the music, it would be left to you to make up the backdrop. make up the context. and you would miss what the movie creators wanted you to feel. The feelings come from the music and the backdrop: the scenery. The context.
During coaching the backdrop becomes visible to the coach. but it remains entirely invisible for the client.
You go through life having the same backdrop. Maybe you add more horrible sentences to it as life gets worse. but all in all, every single person is unaware that how they feel, what they feel, is coming from the backdrop, the words.
In my programs the job is to distinguish and highlight some parts of the backdrop, and either disappear it, or make it less dominant, less operative in our life.
The most dominant sentence on my backdrop was (listen for the violins playing?) ‘I am not wanted. Baah I am not loved. I live on borrowed time. Maybe I should die and then everyone would be happy.‘
Obviously with a backdrop like that, happy moments, laughter came rarely, and even when they did come, they were against the somber backdrop: ‘it won’t last‘.
The backdrop is omnipresent, until you learn to hear it as noise.
Until you have the capability to allow it to be without the urge to fight it.
Or you create another voice that you until you have enough integrity to honor as your voice. A voice that is louder than the original voice that has been telling you how to feel, and therefore what to do and what not to do. Really.
Pay attention here: until you have enough integrity your word is cheap!
When you consider inventing your competing sentence, it is important not to ‘invent’ some new sentence that is exactly the opposite. That will create an oscillating structure, or a pendulum, and will drive you even deeper into despair.
So if your original sentence is that you are a loser, inventing winner is not going to work. You need to invent something truly from no thing.
This is why The Soaring Method works: It helps you invent something that is slightly off the wall, and yet if you make it loud enough, it drowns out the voice that calls you a loser. or the words that tell you you are not enough. Or unloved, unwanted, stupid, useless, worthless, bad, or a soul-crusher…
Do you know your main sentence?
I’ve talked about The Freedom Course before. I have come to the conclusion that it needed to be a series of courses.
The first step in anything is bringing awareness to the situation, awareness to the problem, and identify it accurately enough so that your actions can actually do something useful. That is about 90% of the job.
To the degree you do this part, to the degree that you create a space of no thing, to the same degree you can create anything new that has power.
Clients of mine, especially the ones that like magical thinking, positive thinking will shortchange themselves by not hanging out and distinguishing what is long enough. Or refuse to tell the truth about it.
This is where most programs, most people fall short. This is where most doctors fall short. And this is where most therapists fall short. Ultimately, this where coaches, teachers, scientists, friends, spouses fall short.
- It takes careful listening and a large body of distinctions. Distinctions that most people don’t have.
- And the ability to not get scared of something you don’t like.
- You need to be discerning and ASTUTE.
Astuteness
The astuteness level of humanity is below 1%, the astuteness level of all those who claim they can help is 7%. This means 93% chance that they will try to fix something instead of going deep and dig out what is causing the issue. This is not what you want.
Let’s take the example of my furnace. It stopped working on Sunday.
I KNEW what was wrong. So I contacted my landlord who told me to call the gas provider and tell them I smelled gas. They will send someone out to check up on the situation. I didn’t agree. But he pushed me and finally I called. They came out in less than an hour, and now my heat is restored.
My astuteness level was colored by what had happened before. But looking back, it seems that I spent a few hundred dollars the previous time for something that I could have gotten fixed for nothing.
Luckily my astuteness level in the area of mindset, happiness, purpose, health, and coaching is higher than in the area of furnaces… thank god…
The backdrop and your astuteness
Your astuteness influenced by your ‘backdrop’ as well, as the above example shows. I have elements of ‘do not trust‘, ‘I am clever‘, ‘I can do it‘, and ‘I know and you don’t‘ and those elements in the backdrop will often blind me to the simplest solution.
I have students who pay for email access to me, but never ask for support, because their backdrop says: ‘you should already know this‘. This prevents them from growing, from getting better, from becoming all they can become.
In The Freedom Courses we’ll pull threads out of the backdrop, and examine them. We’ll develop strategies to remove them or overpower them.
For example the sentences I published in a recent article, I repeat here:
- I am unwilling to put up with having to fix myself.
- I am unwilling to put up with having to live my life the way other people want me to live my life.
- Hell, I am unwilling to take on other people’s problem as my own. it is their problem.
- I am unwilling to take on other people’s standards as my own. it is their standard.
These sentences are ‘overpowering’ strategies. They create boundaries, requirements, and distinguish who you want to be, how you want to live by saying who you don’t want to be.
Your results will depend on your level of immersion.
Without immersion you’ll barely get ‘wet’. And you probably will produce no results, even though in the same course, with the same level of intelligence, other people will see freedom for themselves. But not you.
Immersing yourself in what? What is ‘the water’ in that immersion? Is it the solution, or is it the problem?
I am sure you are surprised, but given that the iceberg has 90% under water, your solution will also have 90% under water. You need to immerse yourself in the problem. Not emotionally, but through seeing it.
I would think my latest mini-workshop is the perfect way to start…
In that we were intending to increase your TLB, mental toughness. The workshop went in a way that wasn’t predictable by the topic.
Thank god. It was a lucky accident. We came up with more than what we thought we would.
So I think that maybe that is the most fundamental issue that needs to be addressed.
Find the most fundamental issue blocking you
