Tiny Buddha

Author: Joshua Kauffman

  • Toxic Help: 3 Signs Your Support Is Doing More Harm Than Good

    Toxic Help: 3 Signs Your Support Is Doing More Harm Than Good

    “There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.” ~John Holmes

    As someone who people often come to seeking help or advice, I recently encountered a new situation for me: one in which I chose to stop helping someone and walk away entirely because I determined it wasn’t good—for the other person or myself.

    It felt like the wrong thing to do, but once I had some distance, I knew I had made the right decision. Throughout the helping, I soldiered on and helped and helped and helped until it no longer felt good, and sometime after that I determined it was no longer help at all—it was enablement.

    My good friend—let’s call him Jack—has had a series of extremely toxic relationships. Infidelity, dramatic and very public confrontations, drug abuse, police involvement…. Jack has always played the role of victim in these cases, and in the three relationships I saw him in during the time of our friendship, he was cheated on, dumped, thrown out of the house, and physically abused. He can’t seem to help himself in this regard.

    Last year, he entered a relationship that was problematic before it even began. The very first official date with Henry, the guy who later became his partner, Henry stormed out of a dinner with a group of people, got extremely intoxicated, and got into a fist fight (with a legally blind person no less) and thrown out of another establishment later. This was all on the first date mind you!

    In a sense, this was very lucky. When someone shows you their worst selves, that is often after years together, a shared home, or maybe even a marriage. At that point, it’s usually emotionally and perhaps even logistically very difficult to walk away. On date #1, not so much!

    And yet, Jack persisted.

    Over the course of the next few weeks, Henry, who was already living paycheck to paycheck, was fired from his new job (for which he relocated internationally) for having a shouting match with the boss, and had a dramatic fight with his older sister, who was his only acquaintance in this new country and perhaps his only source of financial support.

    It also became clear the guy was an alcoholic and drug addict. Without a job or the help of his sister, who do you think he immediately turned to for money? Yup, Jack.

    Before too long, Henry’s temper tantrums were directed at Jack’s friends, including myself. The first day I met him, Henry screamed and yelled at me over dinner. In short order, the temper tantrums were turned on Jack, and soon the words became closed fists. He beat up Jack a few times—once leaving Jack with a pair of black eyes—and yet, it was Henry who dumped Jack. Jack kept coming back for more!

    This all unfolded over the course of about six months. During this time, Jack frequently sought my advice. Whenever we talked, I of course let him know how unacceptable Henry’s behavior was, but also tried to get Jack to accept the deeper reality of the situation—that no one who was okay with themselves would tolerate this type of behavior from someone else and that Jack needed to really work on himself.

    As the situation became more threatening and then violent, I counseled Jack in no uncertain terms that it was time to get the hell out of there. Had I been aware shortly after the physically violent episodes (Jack only told me weeks after the fact), I very likely would have become directly involved and called the police.

    After each of these conversations, Jack’s mood brightened from despondent to anywhere from determined to energized. He was going to take action. He was going to see a therapist. He was going to stop giving Henry money and leave him. He was going to make sure not to speak with him alone. And each time… nothing. Same story each time. Each time I saw Jack, Henry was there, often belligerent, and always intoxicated with something.

    However, as incomprehensible as Jack’s behavior and decision-making seemed, it’s not uncommon for victims of abuse, who often suffer from past traumas and therefore have underlying emotional and psychological issues that require professional attention. In fact, it has a name: trauma bonding. I was aware of that, so beyond trying to help protect Jack’s physical safety, I was patient in nudging him toward seeing someone.

    What finally did it for me—the last straw—was after the second or third incident of physical abuse. Jack’s friends, some of whom I knew, were very happy to gossip and complain about the situation behind Jack’s back, especially insofar as it affected their social plans. However, they didn’t intervene or offer him help in any way that I could see.

    Likewise, Jack lived at home with his parents and siblings. Even after coming home black and blue and bleeding, they took no action and never discussed the situation.

    A week later, there were social media postings of Jack and Henry back together again, all smiles. The friends who knew of the abuse? They awarded those posts with smiley faces, hearts, and thumbs up.

    At that point, I realized that I just couldn’t fight this battle alone. It’s difficult enough to try and help someone who is not able to help themselves and indeed seems intent on hurting themselves, but when such a person’s self-destructive behavior is supported and enabled by a whole community of people surrounding them? That is an impossible situation, so I took myself out of it and broke contact. I was out of the country at the time, so it was easier to do this at that point.

    I thought about why I did this. It wasn’t because Jack was so intent on his self-destructive behavior—that just made it difficult, and it’s hardly a unique circumstance. It wasn’t because it was unpleasant—helping someone who really needs it often isn’t pleasant or glamorous, however good it might feel after the fact. And it also wasn’t that I felt in danger from Henry—he was a classic bully, beating up on people weaker than he was, but I didn’t have to see him.

    No, this was something else entirely. This was “toxic help,” and I thought about it and figured out three ways to identify it as such. With these conditions, it’s difficult for me to imagine any help actually being helpful, in which case it’s better for you and indeed everyone else if you extricate yourself.

    3 Ways to Identify Toxic Help

    1. You check yourself and don’t like what you find.

    Whenever you help someone, you should always check yourself first to ensure that this help is coming from a good place, from the standpoint of both your mind and emotions.

    The ego often plays a critical role in instances of toxic help. If you delve deep, you may find that you are actually pushing some agenda or subconscious ulterior motive on the other person.

    For example, you may be helping in part because you are re-enacting some past trauma or mistake you made and trying to fix your past self. Or, you may be trying to impress the person or make yourself feel superior. There are a lot of ways your ego could be manipulating the situation.

    In my case, I didn’t find any evidence of a subconscious ulterior motive. However, what I did find was that I had developed a lot of negative emotions around the whole situation.

    I was frustrated with Jack for making the same error over and over and over again. I was angry with Jack for constantly disregarding my advice—my advice… and that is where my ego started showing through.

    I was furious with his friends and family for allowing and even encouraging the situation to continue and tired of seemingly being the lone voice of care, concern, and sanity. If I was at a more evolved state, that negativity would not have arisen, so that’s probably something I should work on myself. But that was the best I could do at that time.

    Help can never come from a place of anger, any more than it can frustration, resentment, or greed. Negative emotions are part of life, but acting on them pollutes the world with that negativity. I realized that my efforts to “help” were becoming increasingly hostile in nature, and at that point nothing I would do was likely to be successful, because it was no longer coming from a place of love.

    Moreover, negativity transfers, as life is not compartmentalized. My anger, frustration, and other negative emotions were surely spilling over into other facets of my life—my work, friendships, and causal interactions. At that point, even if I was still in a position to help Jack, I’m not sure if it would have been a net positive for the world if, while doing that, I was not honoring the other people and responsibilities in my life.

    2. Your help is causing the other person to stagnate.

    Jack, as I mentioned, normally seemed to brighten a bit after each of our little talks. He would come away feeling more determined, agreeing with my analysis, and sure he was going to do something about it. Walking away from each of those interactions, his back seemed a little straighter and his head held higher. And yet, nothing changed in the situation.

    However, that’s normal with intractable problems and deep-seated behavioral patterns—they’re difficult to change! I realized that my help was not merely failing to have a positive impact, it was making things worse.

    It became clear that each time Jack spoke to me, he mentally tagged that as “doing something.” He felt better that he’d talked through the issues, apparently made some decisions, and probably because he got a lot off his chest—all healthy things. Yet, in his mind, that represented action and progress. When he spoke to me after the fact about what concrete decisions and steps he’d taken, he would offer up our last talk as an example.

    In this way, our talks became like a drug—a little pick-me-up that provided a brief high but did nothing to actually move Jack forward.

    Our talks were counter-productive in this way because they made him feel better, when in fact it is discomfort that typically spurs people to take difficult action. Our talks made him feel more comfortable, when what he needed was to feel less comfortable with the situation. The result was that Jack was avoiding taking the positive steps he needed, such as seeking professional help.

    3. You start role playing “savior” and “person in distress.”

    Any truly close relationship with someone must be authentic. It doesn’t involve role-playing or people doing what they’re “supposed to do” just because it’s something they’re “supposed to do.” It is an exchange, a give-and-take, an open dialogue, and a two-way street.

    Surely, in a long-term relationship, there will inevitably be periods in which one party is the needy one and the other is the helper. Yet, when those roles calcify into giver and taker, and every interaction is one of helping and being helped, that’s no longer a friendship—it’s a co-dependence.

    In my case, Jack had become stagnant. He was not moving forward. If ever he was looking for just some social interaction or “chill time,” he would call Henry or one of his other friends, and this often involved substance abuse. My role just became the helper and advisor, and in truth, our “sessions” had just morphed into pick-me-ups for Jack, so it was no longer even helpful for him.

    So, our relationship became boxed in this way with no clear way forward. Jack got fulfilment of his complex and unhealthy emotional needs from Henry, he got his social needs fulfilled by his enabling friends, and he got his help from me. We all had our parts to play, and indeed the other parties in his life encouraged this system to continue by enabling his behavior.

    The only way I saw to break the mold was for me to change the dynamic, and so I did.

    Not surprisingly, after Henry left the picture, Jack stopped calling for help. He didn’t notice that I wasn’t at his birthday party because I was out of the country, but then again, he didn’t even know that I was out of the country. He hadn’t needed help for a few weeks, so the calls stopped. as my role was temporarily written out of the script… until his next toxic relationship, when he’ll need to find a new helper.

    None of this was easy for me, and it didn’t feel good or natural. I am not one to turn my back on anyone in need, especially not a friend. But I learned and came to accept that I can’t do everything and should not take responsibility to fix what is beyond my ability.

    I really wish the best for Jack, and it would be nice to one day re-establish a relationship, but I needed to create distance in order to restore my own well-being, break the co-dependence that had developed, and banish the helper/person in distress roles that had hardened. In this way, I could be my best self, which ultimately is what’s most helpful to the world.

  • Why I Don’t Define Myself as a Victim and What I Do Instead

    Why I Don’t Define Myself as a Victim and What I Do Instead

    “The struggle of my life created empathy—I could relate to pain, being abandoned, having people not love me.” ~Oprah Winfrey

    See yourself as a victim and you become one. Identify as a victim and you give your tormentor power over you, the very power to define who you are.

    Statements like this have become commonly accepted wisdom today because they are undoubtedly true. If you see yourself as a victim, you will be one. You will be someone who has been defeated, someone who is at the mercy of another, and that is no way to live.

    And yet, the truth is that many people have been victims. Actually, it’s probably fair to say that everyone has been a victim of something or someone at some point in their lives. So, how can we reject being a victim without denying reality? On the other hand, if we accept being a victim, aren’t we then giving up our own power and independence?

    The answer I think lies in part in a subtlety of language, a small distinction with a big difference. Rather than defining ourselves as victims, why not just say that we have been victimized?

    One thing this immediately does is to describe the act, not the person. It means someone was taken advantage of, mistreated, bullied, tricked, or whatever the offense was. It does not disempower that person thereafter by defining him or her going forward after the event.

    In fact, “victimize” is a verb, and just using it seems to bring a sharper focus on the subject rather than on the object. When I hear the word “victimize,” my first thought is “Who did that?” not “Who was the victim?”

    While that may sound like splitting hairs, the word “victimize” describes a moment in time, not a person. It accurately portrays a reality without turning that reality into a perpetuity by defining someone as a victim. It rightfully places emphasis more on the person who shouldn’t have done that rather than the person who shouldn’t have let it happen, as if he or she had any choice in the matter.

    However, there is a much more important point here than those semantics, which is this: While we don’t want to define ourselves as victims, we also don’t want to erase an important part of our story, a part that may have played more of a role in our personal growth and development than anything else.

    As unpleasant as it may be to experience, pain deepens people. To hurt and to be sick is to commune with all of those people who are sick and hurting and who have ever been sick or hurt or ever will be sick or hurt.

    In suffering, one is given the chance to suffer along with everyone else who is suffering, to be connected with a vast array of people facing innumerable different circumstances. To suffer is to be human, part of a much greater whole.

    When coming out the other side, we have a choice. We can forget our suffering and learn nothing, remaining unchanged. Or, we can define ourselves as a sufferer and collect another sad story to cling to. The telling of that story is what creates our ego, and indeed, for many people, that ego is a victim story.

    While on its face a victim identity is not a happy thing, the victim story does have its allure. It certainly can be a way to avoid responsibility and curry sympathy from others. More than anything, it provides the stability of an invented identity, which is exactly what the ego is.

    That stability staves off the ultimate fear—that of life’s ever-changing uncertainty. But, at the same time, clinging to this stability causes us to fight with life, and hence leads to suffering. It is a rejection of life.

    However, there is a third way, which is to accept what happened to us and learn from our suffering to become a wiser, kinder, and more empathetic person. It is to embrace our victimization without becoming a victim.

    Suffering is the great teacher and the great uniter. There is an ancient spiritual teaching from India which asserts that there are three ways to acquire spiritual knowledge: through experience, through reading books, and through a teacher, or someone who knows about it.

    Unfortunately, if you’ve ever met or read about people who have undergone a major spiritual awakening, or if you have experienced one yourself, it is usually the result of the former, and that “experience” is usually pain and suffering.

    So, when we’ve been victimized, we gain some insight and some power. We can recognize those people who are or have also been victimized, or even who are just hurting, and more readily empathize with their experiences. We are more able to be that helping hand, that listening ear, that open heart.

    This is a lesson I have learned though painful experience.

    A few years back, I was in a cancer caregiver support group when my mom was going through her cancer journey starting just a few weeks after my father passed away. I moved back home from very far away and had served in part as caretaker to both of them—a very difficult experience.

    I stayed in the group until my mom was miraculously recovered and it was time for me to get on with my life, maybe after a period of sixteen months. When someone left the group, different members would go around in the circle a say a sort of little tribute to the person leaving.

    One woman in the group came from a very different set of circumstances than I did. I’m a white guy from the suburbs who grew up in stable family and attended a prestigious university. She was a mixed-race African American and Hispanic woman who grew up in a single mother household in the Bronx and went back to get her degree as an adult.

    She had a confession to make. She said when I first came to the group, I just seemed like a privileged white guy from the suburb where I was born. However, as she got to know me and heard me in the group, she knew there was “something” about me—that I could listen to people and hear their pain and somehow relate to them. I could hold space and give good advice at the same time, and she knew it was from the heart. It was not something she expected of “someone like [me].”

    What she couldn’t tell was that the picture-perfect suburban upbringing I had masked an uglier truth.  Unfortunately, my childhood story was one of frequent abuse—physical, emotional, and even on a couple of occasions sexual.

    I grew up in a family of four children, the scapegoat of the family. It was a relationship dynamic that my parents taught to all of my siblings. Thinking back on my childhood, nearly all of my happy memories took place outside of the home—at school, at friends’ houses, by myself, anywhere but home. I was alone in a house full of people.

    While I’d love to say that ingrained a tenderness in me, an intrinsic empathy for the downtrodden, it didn’t. It hardened me and made me uncharitable. I could tough it out. I could push past it all. Why couldn’t other people? That was my attitude.

    Then, well into my adulthood, I had a crisis—a complete emotional breakdown. After years of illness, a difficult career, tragedies among my friends and family, it all become too much. I collapsed but was reborn. It was at that time, when all my defenses crumbled, that I experienced a total change of heart. Among other things, I found my empathy. It was a bottomless well of goodness that I never even knew was there.

    More than anything, I found myself drawn to the outsider. Deep down my harder self had seen the outsider with contempt, probably because I could recall how painful it was to be the outsider growing up. Now, I was able to empathize with that outsider as I fully accepted and integrated the whole of my experience, including my childhood of victimization.

    And yet, having grown up the way I did and even after the big “shift” caused by my breakdown, I still didn’t really think of myself as a “nice” person. I suppose my outer reserve remained intact because I didn’t think people thought of me that way either.

    What that lady in the cancer group said to me that day was better, more meaningful, and more rewarding than any trophy, award, accolade, or recognition I have ever received. But it was a compliment dearly bought, for without my childhood victimization and the suffering I’d experienced in my adult life, I never would have earned it.

    A victim I am not. For that to be true, I’d still need to be sad or resentful. I’d need to be living in some maladapted way, surviving through coping mechanisms and pain management. Is it upsetting when I think about that innocent, happy, carefree childhood I never had? It sure is. But my past brought me to my happy present and taught me heart lessons that I never would have otherwise received.

    When I look back, would I want to live through it all again? Definitely not, but I’m glad it happened that way and thankful for those experiences.

    But, while being nobody’s victim, I do not reject—indeed I embrace—my victimization. It’s part of my story, maybe the most critical part.

  • Knowing When to Let Go of Relationships: 3 Signs It’s Time to Move On

    Knowing When to Let Go of Relationships: 3 Signs It’s Time to Move On

    “Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” ~Deborah Reber

    Thanks to the Internet, our lives are full of people. We’re connected literally all the time.

    And yet, despite our ceaseless connection, we feel disconnected.

    As the pace of life becomes ever more frenetic, we’re like charged atoms, bumping into each other more and more, pinballs in the machine. We come into contact (and conflict), but we don’t commune so much.

    As real relationships of depth and quality become harder-won in this busy new world, their value is more keenly felt. Simply put, in the words of Brené Brown, “Connection is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. It’s why we’re here.”

    As we fight to carve out space for these connections whose value has become so apparent, it’s natural that we cling to them more dearly.

    However, sadly, often the tight clinging to something is the sign that the time has come to let it go. With something as valuable as a relationship, how do we know when that time is? How do we know when it’s time to move on?

    I’ve unintentionally become an expert at moving on. Having lived in perhaps a dozen countries and had jobs with as many as 200 days of travel a year, I am keenly aware of the centrality of relationships. Living out of suitcase and having a rented apartment fully furnished by IKEA, they are all I have. They are my lifeblood. But sadly, I have also become far too practiced at needing to let them go.

    Traveling so much and relocating so often, my life has been enriched by the people I know. So many nights alone in my hotel room, I wasn’t alone. I was writing, speaking, and despite the physical distance, connecting with my dear friends.

    I’d arrange business trips or weekend travel so that I could meet them in some city somewhere in between. It was an effort that I would gladly expend, but I learned to see when that effort was no longer worth it, as difficult as that was to accept.

    Here are the three simple signs that tell me when it’s time to move on:

    1. When you need to plan and strategize how to present yourself

    As life moves forward, we change. Our jobs, our looks, our economic situation, our habits, our interests—everything changes all the time. It’s the one constant in life.

    As two peoples’ lives change simultaneously, gaps inevitably form between them. In a relationship that will stand the test of time, these gaps are bridged with each meeting. It’s the classic case of “We haven’t seen each other for five years, but when we met, it was like no time has passed!”

    However, there are times when, with each meeting, the gaps get wider, and soon they’re more like gulfs. In these cases, we often spend time before the meeting fretting about how to explain, obfuscate, conceal, or excuse. Shame has crept in, and we feel like we can’t be ourselves. We’re either embarrassed of who we’ve become, or we suspect the “new” us somehow will not be acceptable to the other person.

    I’ve put on too much weight—she’ll never like me this way. My career hasn’t taken the same trajectory as his. I got that divorce, while he has the same wife and now three kids. When the joy and anticipation you should feel when reuniting with someone is replaced by anxiety and inadequacy, that’s a really bad sign.

    Of course, it could be all in your head. You don’t give up on the first go. You should make an effort to “be real” and lay it out there that things have changed. You might find it was a lot of worry about nothing. However, if your fears are confirmed and your efforts repeatedly result in awkwardness and shame because the other person rejects this new you, then it’s probably time to move on.

    It’s important to understand that this is not a matter of blame. True love is knowing someone fully. It’s when two people become one but maintain their individual integrity. If you need to be someone else in order to get along, then you cannot be in a truly loving relationship.

    2. When the relationship drains more energy than it gives

    There is almost nothing more nourishing, refreshing, and perhaps even exhilarating than truly connecting with someone. All life is energy, and when someone opens up to you, they share their energy with you, and your share yours with them. Both parties are enriched.

    That laugh you share with your old friend who calls unexpectedly. The warm feeling in your stomach when he smiles at you. The rush you get when she tells you she feels the same way about you. That is all our life force.

    However, some relationships do just the opposite: they drain us. Our interactions with these people do not involve connection, but instead armoring up and deflection, and that requires energy.

    What does this look like? It’s the stressful gaming out of what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it in order to avoid conflict with that person. It’s the unease you feel when you learn that she’s going to be at that party. It’s the constant bickering with your boyfriend into which otherwise joyful occasions degenerate.

    How does this feel? After being with the person, you feel tired, relieved to be away, or annoyed. Beforehand, you may feel nervous, low-energy, or simply like you’re going through the motions or doing your duty.

    Two big caveats:

    First, if this was a relationship that you considered important to begin with, this does not mean you give up on the first bad vibes. Of course you try and try and try again to make things work, but at a certain point the act of pushing the square peg in the round hole becomes too much. It’s just too draining.

    A single negative interaction cannot be enough—in fact, an intense argument shows, if nothing else, that you care about what’s at stake in the relationship.

    Second, this is not a recipe for selfishness. Getting energy does not equate with being the recipient of another person’s affections and generosity. In fact, quite the opposite: anyone who has loved knows how much better it feels to give than to receive; it’s a cliché that happens to be completely true.

    And yet, if over time you are the only one giving, it starts to feel wrong. At some point you realize the person comes to you for help, not to share. A lasting relationship is inevitably one of mutual sharing and generosity. Anything else will start to wear.

    3. When you’re the only one making the effort

    I never thought I would need to face this topic, but today’s world of constant connecting without connection has given rise to a terrible new phenomenon—ghosting.

    Always having access to a connected device, people can easily just switch to some other form of distraction when there is any negativity (or even effort) associated with reaching out or responding to another person. As our reach expands, our time in each other’s physical presence shrinks, and hence it’s now possible to erase people from our digital lives.

    Now, it’s rare to be the recipient of a “hard” ghosting—to literally be blocked. To get to that point would involve a clear and unmistakable rupture in the relationship. However, “soft” ghosting—consistently not responding to messages in a timely manner or not at all, and opting for quick texts over thoughtful outreach and connection—this is something you’ve likely experienced.

    Responses to your outreach become fewer and further between, and at some point you realize that you’re basically out of contact.

    In these cases, the other person has either consciously chosen to focus on other things they deem more important, or they’ve gotten lost in the world of easy connecting. Or, they may simply have decided they no longer care to maintain the relationship and want to avoid the awkwardness of telling you.

    As I began to encounter these painful situations some years back, my first instinct was action and confrontation.

    I made an effort to increase my touchpoints with the person in question, invited him/her to dinners and other meetups if possible. When rebuffed (or more likely ignored), I got to a point where I directly conveyed my distress about where our relationship seemed to be heading and asked if he/she wanted to turn it around and what we could do the change the situation.

    Never once was this route successful. If someone is moving on with his or her life, and there’s no more space for you, no amount of guilting, cajoling, passive aggression, or begging is going to turn it around. That person needs to value your relationship above the alternatives that constantly compete with all our time each second of every day. He or she needs to want to keep you as an important part of his or her life.

    In these cases, the best you can do is reach out, but that outreach needs to taper off—pushing and insisting and pleading will only serve to create negative emotions and likely lead to conflict, or even worse, the person feeling the need to respond to you out of a sense of guilt or obligation. Your relationship lingers on and becomes more stilted and forced and loses its value.

    In fact, in any of these cases—when you feel like you can’t be yourself, the relationship becomes draining, or you’ve been ghosted—it’s difficult not to generate a lot of emotional or actual drama. It’s a sad situation involving someone who at least was once very important in your life. You naturally want to fight for it, and you should, to a point.

    But, like life itself, in relationships you have to learn to trust the flow. You can swim against the current for a little while, steer yourself this way and that, but in the end you cannot control the river. Instead of ratcheting up your response to the situation and effecting an emotional crescendo, do your best to reach out to your friend with honesty and compassion.

    There will come a time when you know it’s not worth it any more. You will feel the negative emotional vibration in the form of resentment, frustration, fear, hopelessness, etc. At that point, however, you risk tainting even the good memories of your time with that person with the bitterness of the breakup. Rather than gratitude for the time you had together, you feel loss. You rob yourself of the relationship you had.

    There is no way of knowing when to act, but in this case you’re not taking action, you’re letting go. The best way to know when to do that is to follow your instinct, and when your time being with and thinking about the person becomes a negative experience, that’s probably a good time.

    The other benefit of letting go rather than fighting is that you allow space for a reckoning if the other person decides to reengage. And though that’s unlikely based on my own experience, it could happen someday.

    After all, you rarely know the exact reasons and motivations for the other person’s behavior. Indeed, they’re often unknown even to the other person, and perhaps unknowable. So, one day you may find your phone ringing, and it’s your friend—people always retain the capacity to surprise you!

    And as hard as it might be to imagine, there may be a good reason for the person’s behavior. You never really know the suffering they’re feeling, but if they’re letting go of a dear friendship, the least you can say is they’re not thinking clearly. Some other suffering is taking hold, and it’s your friend’s loss. Don’t make it a terrible loss for yourself too by creating a drama.

    This is of course easier said than done, but if you stay conscious and draw on your compassion, you can do it.

    Recently, a dear friend of ten years ghosted me. She and I had been through it all: moving countries, marriages, deaths, international travel—all the major life milestones.

    A little over two years ago, she became more and more distant and less responsive. Not surprisingly, this coincided with her becoming much more active on social media and followed a period of tragedy in her life. I reached out repeatedly for about a year, but my efforts eventually led to total silence, and I let go. I haven’t heard from her in a year and a half.

    The moment I knew it was time to let go was when I was tempted to write her something passive-aggressive. At that point I realized I was experiencing the relationship with negativity, which would inevitably come through in my communication with her.

    I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt, but more futile efforts would have hurt even more and put a possible future reconciliation at risk. I also needed to have the compassion to understand that she had recently gone through a tragic time, and undoubtedly that had an impact on her thinking, feelings, and behavior. I hope she’s alright and remain open to the possibility that one day she might come knocking on my virtual door.

    But the truth was clear—it was time to let go.

  • Understanding the Cycle of Pain: How to Transmute Anger into Empathy

    Understanding the Cycle of Pain: How to Transmute Anger into Empathy

    “When we get angry, we suffer. If you really understand that, you also will be able to understand that when the other person is angry, it means that she is suffering. When someone insults you or behaves violently towards you, you have to be intelligent enough to see that the person suffers from his own violence and anger. But we tend to forget … When we see that our suffering and anger are no different from their suffering and anger, we will behave more compassionately.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

    There is so much to be angry about every day because life is unfair.

    My own situation right now is infuriating. I left my job and my home country in large part to return back to the US and help my mom care for my father. During that time, my mother’s frustration with her role as caregiver, along with the emotional stresses and practical limitations it placed on her, often boiled over into rage directed at me. This situation persisted for ten months.

    Immediately after that, she herself became terminally ill, and now my role is caregiver. My whole life plan has had to change as a result, so my hopes of going back to my old life now need to take a backseat to my mother’s illness, which was brought about by her own behavior (smoking). For so many years I had asked her to quit, to which she reacted—you guessed it—angrily.

    When it was clear she wasn’t doing well, I encouraged her to see a doctor. She got angry with me.

    While in the hospital, she was frustrated at being confined to a bed. She took her anger and frustration out on me for that too.

    Now, faced with difficult treatments and limitations on her lifestyle, she lashes out at me every day or two. Me—the only one at home with her, and the only one of her four children who has the will and/or ability to care for her in this way.

    I’m not going to lie—it’s difficult to refrain from reacting in kind, and sometimes I do just that.

    In my cancer caregiver support group, I found this is a common thread—people are angry, and they have difficulty directing and dealing with that anger.

    One woman has a husband whose blasé attitude toward his cancer puts him in a lot of dangerous situations. This completely stresses her out because she is in a constant state of worry about his health and safety. But, rather than expressing these sentiments, she has internalized them, allowing anger to slowly fester.

    It was a significant and therapeutic step for her to actually admit that she was angry. Her way of coping thereafter was to withdraw from her husband in order to preserve her own emotional well-being.

    Another woman was angry because her husband, sick on-and-off with cancer for nearly twenty years, was also depressed through his illness, leaving her as the sole caregiver and breadwinner. Needless to say, her marriage was far from the storybook version she’d originally had in mind. Her way of dealing with her anger was to be productive—to be the best mother and caretaker she could be—and occasionally vent or break down to some trusted friends or our group.

    There is nothing wrong or shameful about either of these two approaches. Both women have shown incredible fortitude in the face of difficult situations. Furthermore, their reactions were certainly much more constructive and peace-promoting than simply popping off and reacting temperamentally.

    However, I have found it helps take me to an even more peaceful state to remind myself of the cycle of pain.

    In this cycle, as succinctly described by Thich Nhat Hanh above, people act out in negative ways (e.g. aggressive, uncaring, etc.) as a result of inner pain. Even if that pain is difficult for us as outsiders to understand, it is there as a matter of fact.

    Though it may help to intellectually understand the specific causes and dynamics of the individual’s pain, in most cases that isn’t possible because you cannot get inside someone else’s head. But we can still accept that the other person is in pain. Once we accept this, we can relate it to our own and therefore feel empathy.

    This is very difficult to do in the moment. What helps me when I feel the flush of temper is to take a deep breath and close my eyes. When I take in that breath, I imagine myself “breathing in” the other person’s pain, which appears to me internally as smoke or pollution.

    I then imagine in my head what they are going through. That is why it helps to understand what the pain is. In my mother’s case, it’s the fear of her disease as well as the discomfort with suddenly having to deal with the restrictions it places on her time and activities.

    I imagine them dealing with that pain, and as the breath comes in I feel a sensation permeate my body. I then let out the breath, which I imagine to be a vapor of peace. I feel lighter and calmer.

    I call this alchemy for the soul—transmuting anger into empathy.

    When I expressed this in the group, I was met with crickets, except for the woman who was angry about her husband’s careless attitude about his condition. She had two comebacks.

    First, she said although that was a “nice” sentiment, she needed to take care of herself at this point and not worry about her husband’s emotions. After all, as the cancer sufferer, he was receiving all kinds of sympathy from every corner. Fair enough.

    Secondly, she said that it takes a lot of energy and effort to “suppress” your feelings when you’re already feeling exhausted from being the caregiver. I understand that too.

    At that point, I dropped the matter, firstly, because I sensed her slight agitation and secondly, because I thought it might strain the dynamics of our safe place if I came across as a preachy teacher in a group of equals.

    What I wanted to say was that this is not about her husband’s feelings. In fact, quite the opposite—doing this would be all about her emotions.

    To hold onto anger and need to direct it somewhere, to me, is draining. I need to carry it around and find where to put it. I need to put effort into not blowing up at someone. To me, this exercise of alchemy for the soul feels like the opposite of “suppression,” whose Latin origin literally means to “press down.”

    When I perform my little alchemy ritual, the feeling is much more of a lightening up or dissolving kind of sensation. Rather than doing someone else a favor, I feel like I am treating myself well, which allows me to treat others well too (and not begrudge them for it!).

    Even when someone else is clearly the “cause” of your anger, it helps to remember that it isn’t really him or her—it’s his or her suffering that is at the root of the hurtful actions. Yes, they are responsible for what they do, but it helps to remember that it’s human to sometimes act out when you’re hurting.

    If you feel that this thinking lets the person off the hook too easily, remember that however hurtful someone’s actions are, no one can “make” you feel a certain way. Ultimately, how you react internally to someone’s actions, what you choose to focus on and how you think about it, is your own responsibility. To blame another person for how you feel is to give him or her power over you.

    To be clear, I’m not making excuses for bad behavior. If someone does something cruel or thoughtless or aggressive to you, it is his or her failing for doing so. But however hurt you may feel in the moment, that person does not have the power to make you carry that hurt with you in the form of anger.

    Once again, this has nothing to do with you being a saint and deigning to give that person compassion or forgiveness; it’s about you taking care of yourself by stopping the angry chain reaction that can lead to all kinds of hurt and unfortunate behaviors.

    Why not just allow yourself to just be angry and make up a sad story about what was done to you in which you are cast as the victim? In a sense, you’re totally justified in doing so, but where does that lead? How does that help you? The truth is, you very well might have been a victim of someone’s aggression in that moment, but only you can make yourself remain a victim by carrying around the negativity.

    When you help yourself by letting go of your anger, you help everyone else around you too.

    This is a practice that has very much helped me, but it’s not the only way to deal with anger. I’m always in search of new strategies myself, so please feel free to tell me what’s helped you cope.

  • 3 Things That Are Helping Me Deal with Stress, Pain, and Loss

    3 Things That Are Helping Me Deal with Stress, Pain, and Loss

    “Being on a spiritual path does not prevent you from facing times of darkness; but it teaches you how to use the darkness as a tool to grow.” ~Unknown

    Life has not been kind lately.

    My aunt passed away in October. She had been suffering from cancer, but her family kept the extent of her illness to themselves, and hence I did not have a chance to see her before she passed away. I felt bad about that.

    My father followed her a month later, just after Thanksgiving. He had been ailing from Parkinson’s Disease, but his death as well was not expected when it happened.

    Two weeks after him, a friend of mine who lives abroad informed me of her diagnosis with a rare form of incurable cancer. She has since passed away before I had a chance to visit her. She was not yet fifty years old.

    Right after that happened, the veterinarian diagnosed my dog with heart failure, and his days too are numbered.

    In mid-January, my mother, who had been depressed after my father’s death, collapsed with a seizure. A tumor was discovered in her brain. Though easily removed, it was traced back to her lung. She too has a rare form of aggressive cancer and though outwardly healthy, her life will probably be limited to months or a couple of years.

    The whole ordeal until diagnosis unfolded over the course of an extremely stressful month, and the future is both frightening and terribly uncertain. Because of this uncertainty, I have needed to change my life plans—I had been ready to relocate and change jobs.

    In the last two weeks, I have had another friend in her forties diagnosed with advanced cancer with a poor prognosis, and my sister’s marriage has come apart.

    Every week it seems brings some new tragedy. As just about everyone who knows me has said: “It’s a lot.” It certainly is.

    I can’t put a happy face on this. Life has just been awful, and I wake up each day praying for no more bad news. There has been such a procession of misfortune that I feel more numb than anything else.

    And yet, I haven’t been destroyed. I’m not depressed. When someone is depressed, whether it’s situational or clinical, they often become self-obsessed and turn just about any event, however positive, into a negative commentary on their life. I’ve been there before, and this is not depression.

    I’m scared, but I feel strong. I know I can handle this. And, I’m very thankful—thankful for what gave me the strength to endure these times: my spiritual journey.

    In 2012, after a years-long series of illnesses, bad romantic relationships, frayed friendships, work drama, and general instability in my life, I had a total breakdown.

    By “breakdown” I mean the whole nine yards—massive depression, professional psychological help, medication, and inability to work or even function normally. However, following this breakdown came the clichéd spiritual awakening.

    This spiritual awakening taught me so many things, most of which you’ve probably already read about, for example: the ego, the importance of being present, the power of vulnerability, etc.

    It was such a fragile period of intense learning and growth built atop a well of deep suffering. It felt terrible, but I learned and changed so much. Though it’s unlikely that I will experience such drastic spiritual growth in such a short period of time again, I realized that I had embarked on a life-long spiritual journey with no end.

    Along the way, there have been fewer but no less rewarding “Aha moments” and new realizations made possible by the consciousness I had gained. Furthermore, there have been many spiritual tests, and each time I worry that I will fail to live the lessons I’ve already internalized, I surprise myself and come through.

    And now I’ve reached an objectively extraordinarily difficult time. This is not a crisis of egoic drama or hurt feelings but real pain—physical suffering and death for so many people who I care about in a matter of months.

    While the spiritual journey is a continuum with multiple themes that are difficult to unravel from each other, there are a few concepts that are sustaining me through it all:

    1. Presence and the now

    The weight of all of it has pushed me into a very intense NOW. I try not to hope because hope has let me down a lot recently, but perhaps more importantly, hope is focused on an unknowable and largely inalterable future. Though in the context of a lot of terrible events, rarely is there anything wrong with this very moment. Despite the pain of recent events, right now there is so much going right.

    Choosing to focus on the good isn’t delusional—it’s an accurate reflection of reality.

    My mother is dying. We don’t know when and there isn’t too much we can do, but thinking of that future is enough to ruin every day. And yet, with our time together now so valuable, I have no choice but to be fully present with her as much as I can.

    I have experienced so much loss recently, but bitterly clinging to that loss will distract me from the precious time I have left with my mother and friends, and it will do nothing to bring back my dad, my aunt, or anyone else.

    However, there isn’t much wrong with right now. My mom isn’t suffering, I’m lucky to be free from work to be with her, and my family has come together in support of each other. The birds sing each morning, the weather is fine, and the forest near our house is beautiful. That’s all real too, and there is much joy to be had in each moment.

    Should something arise in the moment, that’s when I’ll deal with it. While I do occasionally find myself worrying over the future, that serves no purpose and only spoils the now.

    2. Boundaries

    In times of extreme stress when so many things are going wrong, it is critical to exercise self-care; you cannot be a positive force in the world if you’re falling apart inside.

    Boundaries are key to protecting your time and energy, which are particularly challenged in very difficult times, from behaviors that drain them. However, most of the time life is much easier, so we allow people to skate by and “go along to get along” as not to be difficult. After all, we don’t want to seem mean or selfish or unforgiving. We aim to please.

    However, while the importance of boundaries is particularly stark in times of crisis, even in normal times they play an important role in self-care and building healthy relationships.  This is clear when we see what can happen when we don’t enforce boundaries.

    Oftentimes, trying to be nice and agreeable, we allow someone to repeatedly cross the line with no repercussions. As our resentment builds, we may act out in retaliation, doing nothing helpful for ourselves or the world.

    A relationship of true intimacy and mutual respect should be able to easily withstand one party making his or her boundaries clear. If the other can’t handle that, then how deep of relationship is it anyway? In fact, establishing a level of trust with someone to feel comfortable enough to discuss boundaries is in itself a sign of a strong relationship.

    Enforcing boundaries involves a level of honesty that can deepen relationships.

    During my mother’s time in the hospital, frustrated with being confined to bed, she unleashed a stream of vitriol at me that were without a doubt the most hurtful words anyone has ever said to me.

    As difficult as it was to do with her health in such a fragile state, I felt I had no choice; I had to enforce my boundaries. If I am to be her primary caregiver, I couldn’t endure a situation in which she directs her frustrations at me—it wouldn’t work for me, and it wouldn’t work for her. Unfortunately, it was a repeated behavior of hers over many years.

    Without getting into the details, we had a very frank discussion about this, and to be fair, it’s something I let her get away with for a long time by not enforcing my boundaries.

    While initially very painful, this talk led to me sharing deep dark memories and thoughts I never would have otherwise said and clearing a lot of what stood in the way of our relationship as mother and son. That very likely would not have happened had I not stood firm, and I never would have established that open a relationship with her.  However long she has left in this world, I know that this issue, my past hurt from her actions, won’t stand between us again.

    3. Having an open mind

    When faced with a diagnosis as dire as what my mom was given, unless you completely give up, keeping an open mind is often the only way to find good news that you would have otherwise overlooked.

    For example, in beginning my research on this type of cancer, I was dismayed to learn that there has been no material change to the standard of care in about forty years. All of those recent breakthroughs in cancer treatment you’ve heard about, they don’t apply to this one!

    However, rather than declaring defeat right away, I did decide to dig a little deeper. What I found was that there actually are a lot of clinical trials going on in our area for this type of cancer, many of which may provide a good second-line treatment option. Moreover, one of the trial drugs is very likely to get FDA approval in the next year, giving us some options where before there was none. Taking advantage of these would require changing hospitals, so these are developments I never would have learned about had I given up.

    I’ve been reminded to keep an open mind about people too. My mother, typically pretty volatile, has faced this all with amazing strength and equanimity—certainly more than I’ve shown! For someone totally uninterested in spirituality, she has shown a remarkable perspective on all of this in the context of her life, with which she is very satisfied.

    My sister, also going through marital problems while taking care of her baby and usually very emotional, has coped perhaps the best of any of us and has exhibited some very healthy habits for staying even. My brother, on the other hand, himself a doctor, has probably been the most scattered and emotionally crippled by the recent events.

    The point is that whatever you think you know about a person, it can change any day, any time. People can surprise you, for better or worse. While it’s totally rational to make judgment calls about people’s strengths and weaknesses, abilities and attributes, you must always realize that you can be wrong, or that the person might change—in fact, people are changing all the time!

    Spirituality is not about finding a happy hiding place insulated from temporal concerns. It’s quite the opposite—it’s about moving through life with eyes and arms wide open to whatever happens. It’s the way we get down in the mud and go through the wringer and remain who we are.

    Spirituality is a muscle. It gets stronger with exercise, and exercise causes discomfort. But once recuperated, you find you’re able to lift even more weight than before.

    I’ve never had to deal with such a painful series of events, and hopefully I never will again. But however insignificant what I’ve already been through seems in comparison, that past started me on a spiritual journey that prepared me for this present time. Whatever happens, I know I’ll emerge stronger from this too.

  • Soften into Life and You Will be Strong

    Soften into Life and You Will be Strong

    “It’s the hard things that break; soft things don’t break…You can waste so many years of your life trying to become something hard in order not to break; but it’s the soft things that can’t break! The hard things are the ones that shatter into a million pieces!” ~C Joybell C

    Language is a powerful thing. Though often dismissed as “semantics,” the imagery our words and terminology impart often adds unintended or even misguided connotations onto what we intend to say.

    This is why it is so difficult to speak about spirituality. When we say “God” or “salvation” or even “peace,” those words can bear an unintended doctrinal, political, or social stamp on them that means something very different to the listener than it does to the speaker.

    A prime example of this is the “hardness” imagery that is woven into many words intended to be positive, such as “strong” or “tough.” We want to be “strong” and “tough,” to be able to handle all of life’s trials and tribulations without cracking.

    However, these words often morph into an image of hardness. When we are strong, we hunker down, grit our teeth, and bear it. When we are tough, we “power through” the bad times.

    The short-term result is often satisfying. The hard person bounces back quickly from a failed marriage or an illness or losing a long-term job. The trouble, however, is often found beneath the surface and in the long term. What happens when someone spends a lifetime hunkering down and powering through?

    To use a cliché, the tree that doesn’t bend, breaks. A hard tree can endure a lot, but when a strong wind blows, it cracks and falls over. Let’s look at a bunch of images to see this more clearly.

    Brené Brown talks of armor. We put on armor to avoid the hurt. That used to be a way of life for me.

    I once knew someone who had endured a lot of trauma as a child, having been abused and betrayed by people to whom he was vulnerable.

    His survival mechanism developed through these experiences was to not go too deep with people, to hold his cards close to the vest and not open up. This was easier, he explained, because when you were done with someone, you could just move on easily without feeling the hurt.

    What followed in his wake were broken relationships and broken people, who he was able to step past.

    But what does it mean when you don’t let people in and open yourself up to them? You avoid the hurt, but you also miss the intimacy, the connection, and the depth of an open, honest relationship.

    Indeed, how can you even really be in love with someone if you erect an emotional barrier in the way? You can’t.

    As Brené Brown explains, you can cut off feelings—the good and the bad—but you can’t isolate and block out specific types of feelings.

    In order to feel joy and intimacy, you need to allow yourself the vulnerability that will also inevitably lead at times to pain.

    In order to love, you have to deal with the eventual certainty of loss. Otherwise, you’re just kind of numb. You’re not really there.

    People need connection. What happens to someone who moves through life while keeping everyone at arm’s length? What happens to people who don’t show themselves for who they are? I should know—I often avoided authenticity and vulnerability in order to protect myself.

    I was an alpha male. Having grown up in a household where I was set upon by my parents, I learned not to be vulnerable. I became a go-getter—determined, accomplished, and always putting on a strong front, strutting around to ward off those who would hurt me.

    What this meant, though, is that I struggled to find that one person with whom I could be completely honest, and when I did, I put all my eggs in that basket. Hence, when my relationship ended, I was destroyed.

    The more you hurt, the more you fear. The more you fear, the thicker the armor you wear. The thicker your armor, the more it weighs you down. When my armor finally cracked and fell off, it led to a complete breakdown. It was during the recovery from that breakdown that I learned what real strength was.

    I had been determined. I fixed my sights on goals, typically those that would bring me recognition, and I achieved them.  These goals conformed with what is commonly viewed as “success”—wealth, influence, and renown. So, I doggedly stuck to the path, my eyes always forward instead of looking around me. I was tough.

    Life is a long road with many forks. My eyes on the prize, I was unwavering and kept going left. Unfortunately, life was telling me in so many ways to go right.

    I lived in a city that didn’t at all conform with what I valued. I stayed in a relationship that exhibited many warning signs. I had a high-powered, well-compensated job that drained all my time and energy. I was literally sick—in the hospital multiple times each year when I had almost never been in one before that.

    When the pain became too much, I fell apart, and at that point, I had no choice but to go right.

    In that moment, all my hardness couldn’t see me through. And that’s what suffering is: It’s the great teacher that keeps telling you where to go, and the more you try to power through, the more painful and prolonged it will be. Then you soften up and go right, and everything changes.

    Not surprisingly, nature inspired me with the most fitting, if obscure, image: a salt marsh.

    Salt marshes are a natural habitat along coastlines. During storms, salt marshes absorb the force of large waves, which travel into the marshes, lose momentum, and dissipate. If they even hit the shore, the waves retain a fraction of their former strength, and the coast is thus protected. Sand dunes serve a similar function.

    Over time, people have degraded and destroyed these fragile habitats, making storms even more dangerous and destructive.

    To protect harbors, people have built sea walls made of stone. These walls appear strong, but over time sea walls crumble with the force of being slammed by powerful waves or can even cause more destruction when waves ricocheting off of them create violent chop in the water.

    When you are a sea wall, you smack the waves away. The waves hit other people and objects and smack you back. Your resistance creates wake, which damages others and eventually, after a long time, causes you to collapse.

    Instead, be a salt marsh. Absorb the waves and let them pass through you. Accept them. You will be hit with enormous force, but you will not lend that force any more energy. If left unpolluted and unspoiled, salt marshes will survive forever.

    Underneath the hard armor that weighs you down, you’re soft. When you are a salt marsh, your softness absorbs the waves. The hard sea wall smacks them away. A flexible tree bends with the storm, while the hard one doesn’t waver—until it breaks.

    Somehow this image works for so many of spirituality’s life lessons. Let hurt soften you; don’t let it harden you. Let that time someone hurt you open your heart up to compassion for all of those who are hurting. Let it be a reminder in the moment to be more forgiving.

    When an experience is difficult, you can fight with it. But if you surrender to it, let down your walls, and be open to the experience, you will grow from the pain. Give up the hard walls and soften yourself up to what comes your way.

    When floating down the river of life, you’re totally right to swim in the direction you’d like to go. But paddle too hard against the current, and you’ll drown. Try going soft and floating, seeing where the river will take you—it’s not like you have that much of a choice anyway!

    Bravely learn to relax with life and see what happens, and you will make decisions with more wisdom and take actions with more power than if you were fighting.

    As Pema Chödrön says, “Stop protecting your soft spot… stop armoring your heart.” Likewise, “Wretchedness humbles us and softens us… Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.”

    Maybe it’s something like a rule: when you’re in a moment in which your instincts are telling you to be hard, before you act at least take a moment to consider what being soft would look like. What would the soft option be, what could result, and who might you become?

    As a hard alpha-male, I made it far in life. By age thirty, I had been in meetings in the West Wing of the White House, worked with Fortune 500 Company CEOs, been to more than fifty countries, and made lots of money. But that year, I also fell apart, and it took a few years to put myself back together again.

    Now, I’m a struggling entrepreneur. I gave up the suits and the flights and the tough talk. However, though I’ve been through a lot since the big change, I walked—not powered—through it with so much more clarity and even strength than before. I went soft.

    Contemplate softness.

  • A Most Difficult Lesson: People Are Just Doing Their Best

    A Most Difficult Lesson: People Are Just Doing Their Best

    “People are doing the best that they can from their own level of consciousness.” ~Deepak Chopra

    My father passed away suddenly and not so suddenly several weeks back.

    He had been sick for a long time, but it was a gradually progressing illness and not what ultimately caused his passing. So, it did come as a shock, and the last few weeks have been filled with all the random things you need to do when someone dies—change the names on insurance policies and automobile titles, call social security, etc.

    The list seems endless, but now that the tasks are winding down, the silence that is settling in is leaving both my mom and I alone with our feelings.

    I knew this silence would come, and I dreaded it. I was afraid I’d think terrible thoughts about him, and that in turn would make me feel like a terrible person. It’s a long story…

    There’s no sugarcoating it: My dad was not a great father to me. He provided for our family and didn’t do drugs or drink. He bought us nice presents for the holidays. He did teach us a healthy respect for the rules. He also made it very clear he had a favorite child, and it wasn’t me.

    He wasn’t affectionate to me, and he once told me as a child that he wasn’t interested in me as a person because I wasn’t interested in what he liked to do, and he followed through with that by withdrawing from participation in my various childhood pursuits. He occasionally, though not often, beat me with his hands and objects.

    Nothing I did ever seemed to please him. When I got a job in addition to taking a full suite of university courses in high school (I was the only child of four who did that), he said I didn’t make enough money.

    When I got into the university of my choice (an elite one), he said I should have chosen a secular school, and the one and only time he visited (it wasn’t too far from our house), he said it was “full of crosses.” I cannot remember him ever saying he was proud of me.

    He was rarely affectionate with me, and he was loath to comment on my successes while he frequently reminded me of my failures and, above all, the expense I was costing him. The list of the scars I bear from my relationship with him could go on and on and on.

    So, though I have always had a problem with the phenomenon of people being beatified when they pass away, I feared not responding to his passing with compassion and instead being accosted by negative thoughts and feelings about him during the silence that followed.

    Silence of course invites in the ego, that often very negative voice in the head. I feared feeling and acting like an insensitive, ungrateful person and wondered how I would feel if my own family thought such things about me if I died.

    Like so many times when we face a spiritual test, I surprised myself. Once the initial shock and overwhelming grief I felt passed, I found that my disposition toward him was surprisingly kind.

    First and foremost, I just feel sorry for him—he suffered for a long time and died too young. Beyond that, I feel grateful for having him as a father because I know he did his very best, and I recall that as perhaps the most important lesson he taught me years before: people are always just doing the best they can.

    This lesson is a very difficult pill to swallow. Most everyone knows lying and stealing are wrong, and yet so many people do them anyway. Violence and aggression are among society’s universally believed wrong, and yet our world has way too much of them. In the grip of feeling oppressed or victimized, it’s almost impossible to hold this thought in our head—we’re too logical for that.

    But consider for a moment: That lady in the store knew that hurling invective at the cashier who couldn’t figure out the correct coupon code is impatient, unkind, and probably unreasonable. The guy on the road who cuts people off knows he doesn’t like it when people do that to him, and he knows his actions make a road accident more likely. They do it anyway. How can we even think they’re doing their best?

    One way is to think about it very cleanly: What would you say about someone who knows something to be wrong and yet cannot summon the self-control, patience, compassion, or whatever it may be to stop themselves from doing it?

    In that moment, the person is not conscious enough to refrain from the hurtful action. The person is not connected enough to identify with those his or her actions are harming. Something is holding that person back from showing up fully and achieving his or her full human potential for goodness.

    The maddening fact for those of us who skew to the hyper-logical side of the spectrum is that in 99.9% of cases, you’ll never know what that something is. In fact, no matter how well you know someone, the best you can do in terms of understanding his or her motives, subconscious thoughts and emotions driving behavior is an educated guess.

    However, I knew my dad as well as he allowed anyone to, and I was very familiar with his personal history, so I had a pretty good idea what those somethings holding him back were.

    He grew up in an abusive household, and his dad eventually abandoned his mom and him. He was poor. He lived in a tough inner-city neighborhood and was bullied terribly as a child.

    His mom was a cold and distrustful woman with few if any friends and estranged from almost her entire family. She relentlessly hounded him about his every dollar of expense.

    Not surprisingly, he carried the pain of this upbringing with him throughout his whole life, and he had no example of what good parenting looked like.

    Without that example and with all the wrong lessons and accumulated pain he carried, is it any surprise Dad had difficulty expressing affection?

    Given how little positivity and support he had growing up, how would he have known how to or even that he should have expressed those things to his family? With his mom being estranged from so many people, how could we not expect him as a child to have learned this as a normal state of affairs?

    Indeed, he struggled to improve on key parts of what was lacking in his childhood. He was singularly focused on materially providing for all his children—even after he strongly established his financial security—because he knew what it was like to be without material well-being.

    Though he definitely was abusive to me at times, this was something that was not a normal state of affairs in our household the way it was in his. Thus, the ways in which he was traumatized most reflected in his parenting, in some way for the better and in some for the worse. It must have been difficult for him.

    I can’t say that this realization came easily to me. It took time and distance and only came to me after I had left home for years, during which my time personal hurt gradually faded.

    As my life began to fall into place literally on the other side of the world, I saw from afar all the dysfunction unfolding in my family. Not only did I realize that I should be thankful I was removed from it, but I understood it was the best they could do.

    As an outsider in the family, I had observed the various inter-personal dynamics at work, and I could identify with how powerless and ill-equipped Dad must have felt to deal with all of it.

    This understanding gave me such peace and even empathy, and it freed me from my youthful anger and resentment toward them. Nevertheless, it was only years later when I had my own spiritual awakening that I fully understood the implications, universal applicability, and power of this lesson.

    But the truth is that you’ll never know most people that well, and even if you did, you may never even think you understand the ways in which they’ve been damaged. Some of the most unfortunate people are against all circumstances among the most joyful, while many of the wealthiest and most popular celebrities are miserable and lead tumultuous lives.

    The mind and the ego are capable of creating their own narratives, which their hosts typically completely identify with. We can never fully understand, but that’s just it—people themselves are rarely aware of their reasons for doing what they do and feeling what they feel.

    And there it is: People’s level of consciousness—their awareness of their own feelings and mind (i.e. their ego), as well as those of the people around them—determine how well they can see their own actions and behave with grace.

    Dad had a lot of accumulated pain, which had never been given voice, and he didn’t even realize it to be able to strive for better. What he did realize, for example the insecurity of poverty, he tried mightily and indeed succeeded in improving upon.

    Likewise, when I beat myself up for responding to others’ plight with coldness and distance, I need to remind myself that this was the model I had growing up, and unless an outside observer was really familiar with the dynamics of our family, there’s no way he or she would understand that about me.

    When I feel shame at failing to recognize others’ efforts and accomplishments, I need to remember that’s how I was raised. This was the next step I made after my spiritual awakening—I was able to broaden the whole “they’re doing their best” lesson to myself and others.

    And now the next step—the most challenging one—is to try and remember this each and every day.

    When faced with that lady yelling about the coupons or the guy who just cut you and four other people off as he sped down the highway, in the midst of your indignation, can you take a breath and remember that they’re doing their best?

    How do you know if that lady is maxed out on her credit cards or has a sick husband or just lost her job? Perhaps the angry driver is rushing home to see his sick son or has an anxiety disorder. Whatever the circumstances—and in these cases you’ll never know what those are—that is quite simply the best they can do in that very moment.

    When your coworker takes credit for your work and tries to hide it from you, can you accept that she’s operating from a place of pain or fear and that you will likely never understand what exactly that looks like?

    Knowing that the coworker is still doing his best doesn’t mean you can’t respond appropriately to right the situation, but can you do so from a state of compassion and not anger? If you can summon the empathy to do so, you’ll likely realize how much more effective your response will be.

    So, though it may annoy you to no end, you’ll never know how people process their own past and how that past is expressing itself in the present. In the grip of a terrible situation when you just want to wring someone’s neck, try to remember that. Moreover, when you find yourself remembering, give yourself credit. You may surprise yourself, as I just did with my father’s passing.

    I’m still grieving and will be for some time. The pain and fear my dad felt for so long… it just isn’t fair. He didn’t deserve that, just like I didn’t deserve my lonely childhood.

    None of us deserve what happens to us, right? We’re born innocent, and yet we all suffer through a lot, whether that be physical or emotional—totally in our own heads. Just try to remember that—we’re all in this together.

    Thanks, Dad for teaching me that lesson to live by, and so long.

  • What If We Listened and Opened Our Minds Instead of Shouting and Judging?

    What If We Listened and Opened Our Minds Instead of Shouting and Judging?

    “If you can laugh with somebody and relate to somebody, it becomes harder to dehumanize them. I think that most of what we are constantly bombarded with in terms of media leads you to a creation of ‘the Other’ and a dehumanization of ‘the Other,’ and it’s very much an us-versus-them conversation.” ~Jehane Noujaim

    People are really hard to hate up close.

    In today’s acrimonious political climate, whole groups of people seem to be pitted against one another based on various political, ideological, class, geographic and racial classifications. And yet, spend a day with “the other” and it’s difficult to resist the gravitational forces of our shared humanity that make those walls come a’ tumbling down.

    New York State, like many others, has a wonderful tradition of civilian run elections. Each polling precinct is manned by four election inspectors—two Democrats and two Republicans.

    From 5:30am to 9:00pm—other than the two thirty-minute breaks to which each inspector is entitled—these four individuals spend every moment together sharing responsibility over the most minute of tasks, from opening packets of ballots to recording the serial number of the dozen or so seals on various documents and pieces of equipment.

    Once the polls are closed, vote tallies recorded and everything securely stowed, usually round 9:30pm, everyone goes home. It’s a long day.

    For these sixteen hours of work, all inspectors are earn $225, or around $14 per hour—not bad, but well below the earning potential of most of the inspectors. Many of the inspectors are “old-timers” who have been doing this three or four times a year (in addition to the big November elections, there are primary elections and other local referendums) for many years.

    Last year, sort of in between jobs and living in the United States for the first time in many years, I decided to become an election inspector.

    Far removed from America’s increasingly bitter political divide, I was a little bit apprehensive about what to expect or how this was all going to work so harmoniously. After all, the America I left after graduating from college was one in which people from all segments of our political spectrum—which compared to other countries’ is surprisingly narrow—could have a discussion without being branded white supremacists, snowflakes, fascists, or traitors.

    Once upon a time in the quaint old days less than twenty years ago, political talk was sometimes pleasant and not always so insufferable and divisive.

    Like all others, my polling station had three other inspectors. One of the other inspectors turned out to be the father of a girl I’d grown up with from our Hebrew school days but had not seen in nearly twenty years, once a close family friend.

    Another was a retired school administrator, an Irish guy who had grown up in the Bronx and slowly migrated ten miles or so north to Westchester County over the course of his life.

    Finally, there was an African American lady who had been born, raised, and was still living in Mount Vernon, a nearby city perhaps most notable as the sometime home of Malcolm X.

    As the hours passed and different members of the team shared the various responsibilities and each took his or her break time, everyone found themselves getting to know the others one by one.

    With the one guy whose daughter I used to know, reconnecting was fun, and nothing seemed to have changed other than that we were all older.

    The Irish guy shared my love and knowledge of the local waterways (I’m a sailor and he’s a diver). He was a Republican who didn’t vote for and viscerally disliked President Trump; he was more of a John McCain or Nelson Rockefeller kind of guy who felt Trump was an abomination to his lifelong political affiliation.

    The African-American lady was a Democrat who, judging by her apparent age, may very well have remembered or even met Malcolm X during the tumultuous Civil Rights Era, didn’t like Trump either but also didn’t understand the current white supremacy scare. She remembered a lot worse racial tension and fear in her lifetime and thought that all the recent talk was based in reality but overblown.

    During the slow portions of those sixteen hours, even when politics came up, nobody raised their voices nor found anything to get angry about. Politics was sprinkled around more immediately pressing topics like family, local community developments, and lunch.

    And, where there were disagreements, after talking it all out with the copious amount of time that we had on our hands, it became clear that there was a strong foundation of shared values—respect for individual freedoms, belief in racial equality, etc.—on top of which the (relatively minor) disagreements were built. There was much more in common than there was different.

    You would never know it from reading the headlines, but this observation is actually reflective of society at large, as political science studies and public opinion polls over the years have consistently shown a clustering of public sentiment on most major issues toward the center.

    And yet, the loudest and most extreme voices seem to be the one that dominate the debate. Controversies erupt over smaller and smaller issues, such as symbols of past oppression as actual oppression becomes less prevalent.

    It’s not that today’s issues are trivial—you would certainly be concerned if you were a gender non-conforming person being forced into using a bathroom based on your biological sex or an African American who had to pass by a statue of Jefferson Davis every day on your way to work—but that the final 10% of every issue, namely the public policy prescription for how to “solve” it, is nowadays typically built on top of an agreement over 90% of the multiple facets and relevant fundamental questions involved.

    Only the most extreme fringe elements of society support institutionalized discrimination, secession from the nation, limitation of basic rights, etc. In most instances, the disagreement is over the “how to get there” as opposed to the “where we are going” or “who we are.”

    More importantly, whatever people’s political beliefs, it is exceedingly rare to find people today who are consciously bigoted. He might think men are men and women are women like in the good old days, but faced with an actual person—maybe his son or nephew—undergoing a struggle with gender, those fixed opinions usually soften.

    She might not get her sister-in-law’s “churchiness” but nevertheless appreciate the values it seems to instill.

    These prejudices are borne from ignorance and isolation, not hate.

    Moreover, even among people affiliated with bigoted or extreme views or organizations, it is my firm belief that what is at work is more an unfortunate facet of group psychology: it is easy to hate a distant group, a faceless enemy, or a caricature of a supposed threat.

    It is even easier when riled up by a group of like-minded people, an all-too-common phenomenon as America self-segregates by class, culture, and geography.

    And, to pour gasoline on top of this whole incendiary situation, it is still easier when these types of conflicts sell papers and generate clicks, especially within marginalized communities suffering economic or cultural dislocation.

    Not surprisingly, the most extreme and bigoted views are typically found in relatively homogenous and often economically distressed communities far away from many of the problems or “bad guys” they fear. When people get together, hate becomes difficult to maintain, and it is difficult not to relate with one another on some level.

    I wonder how fixed all of these angry opinions would be if we all at least once spent sixteen hours at a polling station or had to live and work in ideologically integrated communities or even share a meal with “the other.”

    I wonder how long it would take the narrative of this hopelessly divided nation to unravel before the truth that we all share so much more than what divides us.

    Perhaps there is a small duty we should take on each and every day from now on.

    If you’re reading this, you probably already accept the most basic spiritual truism that we are all part of something greater, and the goal of nirvana or heaven or whatever you choose to call it is the oneness without separation from all life.

    Why not endeavor to keep that in mind the next time you are in a heated political argument or shouting at the television? After all, the concept of oneness isn’t meant to be merely a comforting idea but a way to live, a view of a better earth.

    Even better, why not go out of your way to break down the daunting barriers that divide us? Reach out and engage or listen to someone outside of the type of person who would normally be inclined to agree with your point of view.

    And, your engagement need not be about politics. Maybe it would be even better to focus on something that’s shared. You’ll probably find the “daunting barrier” is more like a “thin veneer.”

    There is also gratitude, an indispensable daily practice in a spiritually oriented life. Once again, the issues involved in politics today are not trivial—injustice is alive and well in this world, and so much needs fixing. However, can we not each day take a moment and realize how far we have come?

    For example, white supremacists were able to muster a few hundred people to march on Charlottesville, VA in the largest such rally in decades. Have we forgotten that less than a century ago the majority of America—not a fringe group—shared most of their uglier points of view?

    Likewise, while poverty in America remains a stubborn problem, can we not be thankful that we are indisputably living in an age of unprecedented prosperity among humankind?

    The point of this gratitude is not to engender complacency. There is simply too much at stake. However, if we can find space for gratitude, perhaps even the most strident voice of the most passionate advocate of whatever policy could be softened. The angry activist could become the happy warrior.

    And that’s one of the major ironies of today’s politics, that with such an air of negativity, even the most just cause will repel fair-minded people. Gratitude can help us to stop shouting and start listening and speaking with one another with respect and love.

    This is how spirituality and consciousness, which are as a genre of writing or literary interest so often completely divorced from current affairs, can help heal our poisonous political atmosphere.

    After all, spirituality isn’t about escaping the world and self-soothing by occupying a peaceful place in the clouds; it’s about gaining the strength to thrive in a challenging world and even doing the hard work to make it better.

    As I found, after sitting in an overtly political setting for sixteen hours with three other apparently very different people who disagreed on a lot of topics, the work isn’t always so hard. It can even be fun.

  • Self-Love Means Never Saying “You Complete Me”

    Self-Love Means Never Saying “You Complete Me”

    “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.” ~Buddha

    A popular topic in the glossy magazines, learning to “love yourself” always seemed to me to be a self-indulgent first-world pastime.

    It seemed obvious that the commonly-repeated mantra “love yourself first” was just a sign of the times in a world where something like half of all marriages end in divorce. When I dug a little deeper I often found either a list of new spa treatments or a litany of new age catchphrases.

    All meaningless—that is until a series of failed relationships taught me the hard way why you have to love yourself first.

    I had always walked into relationships from the standpoint of something I needed or wanted. I wanted to feel valued and loved. I needed to feel that my struggles had meaning, and I found this in external validation. I craved for someone to stand by me and tell me that I was worth it.

    In my extremely busy and fast-paced life, I was surrounded by people so very lonely, starved of meaningful connections in a world of transactional relationships. Always the alpha-male, I craved a safe space where I could lower my defenses and be affectionate. A relationship became my way of getting what I thought I needed.

    For a decade of my life, this didn’t go well, and it certainly didn’t end well. It ended with me on the floor of my living room surrounded by pills and full of suicidal thoughts. But, after I picked myself up, this and many other truths revealed themselves to me.

    A need arises from something we find missing in ourselves.

    We need someone to tell us we’re important because we don’t feel worthy to begin with.

    We feel lonely because our lives aren’t full, and we’re waiting for someone to fill them up.

    We so crave those affectionate and reassuring words from someone we care about because we don’t feel pretty, smart, promoted—or whatever—enough. If he or she is a good mate, our need is satiated. This is why “you complete me” became such a widely expressed notion of the power of love. Unfortunately, that sort of thinking leads to dangerous places.

    We aren’t “complete” to begin with because of the very thing(s) we feel we’re lacking, or the inadequacy of our being.

    We make ourselves as attractive, accommodating, or desirable as we can to cover up these faults and fool an eligible partner into looking past our shortcomings. Eventually, we win, and then the prize is ours. And they both lived happily ever after. Except that rarely happens because that void always needs to be filled.

    We’ve told ourselves the story of our lives and convinced ourselves of the short (or long) list of things our partner can give us that will make us happy at last. But somehow it’s never enough, and when we get it, we want more of it, or something else entirely. Our demands to be listened to or supported or valued somehow seem to increase over time.

    And maybe we even become resentful. After all, we need to keep our partner fooled into continuing to see past our inadequacies, so we “hustle” for love.

    We have put so much effort into making ourselves attractive to begin with, and it’s very difficult to ever let the mask slip, lest he or she find the truth and see us for who we are. It all takes so much effort, and maybe we begin to think “It’s his fault I feel this way.”

    This is where coming into love from a place of inadequacy leads. But, when we accept ourselves for who we are, when we recognize our flaws but do not doubt our worth, we don’t seek wholeness in another person. Perhaps we even work on our perceived flaws, but we recognize these as suboptimal behaviors, not something wrong with us.  We do bad, but we are not bad.

    It’s still totally natural and healthy to have a set of desirable characteristics when we seek out that someone and boundaries for acceptable behavior, but this is a matter of choice, not need.

    When we enter a relationship from a place of worthiness and self-acceptance, we don’t hold our partner accountable for our shortcomings or expect her to fix us. We can focus on joy—which is happiness from within—rather than expecting or demanding that the other person supply it from without.

    After all, when we expect our partner to supply stuff to us in order to make us happy, crudely put, he or she becomes our dealer. Though of course it’s a bit more emotionally complicated than that, we are in a sense using the other person to fulfill our own ends, and guess what? He or she is probably doing the same to us. It somehow works!

    And what does it mean to accept yourself wholly, warts and all? What is it to say: “Maybe I let my jealousy get the better of me sometimes, but my heart is in the right place, and I don’t need anyone to prove that to me”?

    How is it that someone can say, “I’m responsible for my own happiness, and I want so very much to share that with another person”? That is loving yourself first, and that love has to stem from a deep place of worthiness.

    Love is many things, but one of them is total acceptance with no barriers. If we can’t feel that way toward ourselves, then how can we feel that way with someone else? What we do not accept about ourselves, we do not reveal to someone else.

    Love is also the most highly evolved, pristine form of connection, and connection is what gives meaning to people’s lives. This then leads to the false assumption that we need to be given love by other people in order to feel whole.

    In fact, the reverse is true. When we feel whole, we are able to love other people, and that is how we connect.

    This took so many years and so much heartache for me to figure out. When I looked back on all those failed relationships, though I typically still felt justified in some of the grievances I had, I took responsibility for the fact that it never would have worked out as long as I was seeking validation from another person.

    It would be nice and neat for me to say that now, possessed of this understanding, I found the one and am in the midst of my happily-ever-after. That’s actually far from the case! But, what I can say is that I’ve been in a couple of relationships since, and although their endings hurt, they in no way destroyed me or shook me to my core the way they had previously.

    Never again did I doubt if I was worthy of that kind of happiness or having those kinds of boundaries of self-respect. The grieving process happened, but it ended, and I remained who I was.

    To love myself first is to never have to say “you complete me” again, because I am complete just the way I am. It is to stop hustling for love and allowing myself to be loved. Far from being self-indulgent, it is such a humbling feeling, and it will set you free.

  • How We Can Break the Cycle of Pain

    How We Can Break the Cycle of Pain

    “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” ~Gandhi

    Pain is and isn’t just like energy. According to the first law of thermodynamics, energy can neither be created nor destroyed but is merely converted from one form to another.

    For example, the light energy from the sun can be harnessed by plants, which, through photosynthesis, convert it to chemical energy. Plants use this energy to grow fruit, which we eat. We store this energy for when we need to exert ourselves, when we convert it to kinetic energy. The energy never disappears but is instead just displaced.

    Pain is in a sense the same, creating a parallel to the first law of thermodynamics, which I call the cycle of pain.

    The manager is belittled by his boss because the boss was frustrated with the latest quarterly results, which disappointed because the customers were unhappy with the product. Upset, the manager comes home and mouths off to his wife, who is carrying her own tribulations from work.

    The wife and mother then loses her temper with her son, who is hurt by his mother’s outburst. In pain and having witnessed a bad example from his mother about what to do with frustration, the son then goes to school the next day and causes a fight in the classroom during the teacher’s lesson.

    His plans in tatters with the class disrupted, the teacher then exacts collective punishment on the whole class, who then each go and act out the negativity in their own separate ways.

    The form of the pain changes, but it doesn’t go away—it’s spread out and perpetrated on new victims in a seemingly endless cycle of pain.

    Except it can go away. After all, pain differs from energy in some important ways.

    First of all, pain can be created, added to, and multiplied or increased exponentially.

    Above, the frustration that the teacher caused can turn into sadness, hurt, or anger among his thirty pupils, who then have a negative emotional-energetic push to transfer and potentially increase the pain.

    More and more people are born and live longer each day, meaning there are more egos to feel and create pain. The internet and other mass communication technologies only expand each single person’s ability to transfer and create more and more pain in more and more people. Weapons of mass destruction have the same function. This is a depressing picture.

    The story, however, isn’t all bad, and as conscious human beings, we can actively work to stop the flow and creation of pain.

    When the husband comes home to vent at his wife, the wife can always ask what the matter is, listen compassionately, and react with love and a desire to help ease the pain.

    When the child acts out in school, the teacher can always take a deep breath, draw upon her compassion for whatever is driving an innocent child to be aggressive, pull the child aside, and try and find out what’s wrong.

    We can all recognize that another person’s negativity is his or her pain, not ours.

    This is very simple to comprehend but extremely difficult to achieve. It takes a lot of effort.

    Put yourself right in the moment of a very tense or stressful situation. Your boss has had a stressful week and is screaming at you, blaming you for the entire team’s failure or something that had nothing to do with you. Your mother always favored your older brother and is interrogating you, asking why you didn’t get married and have the perfect job like he did. Pick a real example from your own life.

    How did you react—with total serenity and compassion? Did you lovingly embrace this as a spiritual challenge and opportunity for growth? In all likelihood, far from it!

    You probably shouted back, clamped down, cried, or otherwise reacted to negativity with negativity, and this in turn negatively affected someone else. Why? Because this is hard—really hard. And yet, it’s the struggle we, as human beings, face every day.

    However, when we sit around and think about being our best, about trying to make a difference in the world, we think about legendary figures placed in the fulcrum of historic events. We think about Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Teresa. Saving the rain forest, ending poverty, or finding a cure for some horrible disease come to mind.

    In fact, very few people will ever even have the chance to be in the right place at the right time to make such a difference. Even if we had the skills and desire, we might not have the resources or connections, or even be born in the right era, to effect such a change.

    By definition, not everyone can accomplish extraordinary things. The rain forest needs saving, poverty needs ending, and diseases need curing, but why not start with what you can influence right now—the world’s little daily hurts that, through the cycle of pain, create big problems?

    But this is our bias, made dramatically worse in recent years by social media: to overlook or even look down upon the ordinary. And yet, it is the ordinary, everyday flow of life that is so difficult to navigate in a way that does no harm to ourselves or others. Indeed, daily life presents our most obvious opportunity to change the world around us—to end the cycle of pain.

    Imagine a world where parents didn’t smack or shout at their children out of anger, where spouses didn’t take their work frustrations home and get passive aggressive with each other, where strangers didn’t project their pent-up feelings onto each other.

    Imagine all of the infinite little tragedies that could be avoided. Imagine the child who, in a moment of despair, sees a helping hand instead of a fist. Think of what a different place the world would be if one million or one billion people had this same thought all at once.

    I, too, once had a head full of grandiosity, all the while overlooking the difference I could make each and every day.

    Growing up in an affluent suburb of New York, I was raised like most of the other kids in my peer group—to be hyper-competitive and keep up with the Joneses. I wanted to be a famous academic, a CEO, or the president. I thought about ending wars, saving the environment, and changing the economy.

    I was also short on patience. I punched back. I showed off. I overlooked people. It was only after I was brought so low by pain, when I saw no way forward, that I dropped my illusions and really thought about how to move forward in the world. When I felt there was no hope, I stopped contemplating the horizon and instead looked right in front of me.

    For maybe the first time, I really saw the people who came into my life and got to know so well who had wronged me, betrayed me. Rather than cursing them or begrudging them, I thought about how they got the way they were—their being bullied or even molested as children or abandoned as adults (true stories!).

    I thought about myself, put upon by my siblings and ignored by my parents. And I realized what a difference it would have made if even some minor character in any of these stories would have taken the initiative to break that cycle of pain.

    Everything that happens in life is the result of an unknowable series of chance events that happened over centuries. You are here right now because some peasant in the fields a thousand years ago smiled at one of his fellow laborers or some seamstress took the risk of getting on a ship bound for America or someone crossing the street didn’t get hit by a car.

    Likewise, the gang member might not be in jail if that teacher had taken a chance on him. The cheerleader might not be bulimic if someone had taken the time to notice her eating habits or cared enough to say anything.

    Even when we aren’t causing it, so many of us shut our eyes and turn our heads to other people’s pain because we’ve been hurt ourselves and don’t want to face more pain if we can avoid it.

    To come to and maintain the level of consciousness necessary to actively counter the cycle of pain requires a spiritual vigilance that is profound and yet so simple. To break and not perpetuate the cycle of pain, to purify and not pollute our emotional environment, is so mundane but can be so impactful. To me, this is what it means to be the change I wish to see in the world.

    Once I recovered from the deep, crushing, suicidal depression that I suffered, I left my high-flying job. I moved countries. I extricated myself from destructive relationships. Coming from a life in which I interacted with senior politicians and CEOs, I instead dabbled in coaching and tutoring and other endeavors I saw as making a small difference. I slowed down and, instead of chasing grand visions, became much more conscious of what I was doing each moment.

    This was a difficult transition to make, and it is a challenge each day to remember the cycle of pain and my role in it and, more importantly, not to perpetuate it. Nevertheless, I find life so much more rewarding now. Though my path is littered with mistakes and small failings, most days I am able to see the incremental positive differences that I make.

    I don’t know what all of this will amount to, but what I do know is that I feel so much more rewarded and empowered.

  • Why Surrendering to Life is the Key to Positive Change

    Why Surrendering to Life is the Key to Positive Change

    “Surrender to what is. Say ‘yes’ to life and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” ~Eckhart Tolle

    “Surrender” in current colloquial language equals failure. According to the Oxford Dictionary, without an object, surrender means to “stop resisting to an enemy or opponent and submit to their authority.” With an object, it gets even worse: “Give up or hand over (a person, right, or possession), typically on compulsion or demand.”

    How then can surrender be the key to joy?

    At age thirty, I was defeated by life. Down for the count. But, I did not get back up on my feet until I surrendered.

    I had led a charmed life until then. I got into every college to which I applied and went to my top choice. I graduated summa cum laude and got into a similarly impressive grad school, where I also graduated at the top of my class.

    After a White House internship, I landed a job at a top investment bank and had moved to an equally prestigious consulting firm. I had lived in and traveled to dozens of countries. I was a winner.

    Or was I? Life had thrown me a string of curveballs: health problems, friend problems, romantic problems, professional problems.

    While, to an outsider, I might have appeared to be “living the dream,” the “dream” entailed eighty-plus hour workweeks and constant travel. After a few years of this, my life had totally unraveled, and after knowing nothing but success, I encountered nothing but failure.

    The stress and over-work likely contributed to a string of illnesses, hospitalizations, and surgeries.

    I was exhausted after more than ten years of sleeping on average less than five hours a night, and my weight had yo-yoed drastically.

    My partner of three years had left me, telling me, to boot, that it was essentially never “a real thing” to begin with anyway. A second equally intense relationship ended in a similar way.

    All of this happened when I was living as far away from my hometown as you can get on the globe, and after being so busy for so long, I had almost no one to turn to where I was living. I was completely untethered.

    I just wanted it all to end, to make the pain go away. One day, I literally found myself on the floor with a bottle of pills in my hand, contemplating suicide. I almost followed through, but something happened, or actually, a lot of somethings did.

    One of the very first somethings that happened was that I became aware of the self-talk in my head and was able to disassociate from it, listening to it as a separate entity.

    Perhaps its most recurring commentary was some version of “this isn’t how it was supposed to happen.” I had achieved so much so early in life and worked so hard. I should have been rich. Happy. Successful. Instead, I was a mess.

    It was all these “shoulds” that almost killed me because they left me stuck in a mental construct of my own making, set up in opposition to what was actually happening.

    At the beginning of a long recovery process, perhaps the key moment came when I was able, however briefly at first, to occupy a reality without these shoulds and instead face whatever was at that particular moment.

    It was only later that I was able to grasp the significance of that first moment of surrender. Surrender is not giving up on life but giving up fighting with life. And, when you’re not fighting with it, you’re working with life.

    At first, our moral sense is offended by this. In a totally just world, there are a lot of things that should be. People should be nice to each other. Good things should happen to good people. But, if we take this to its logical conclusion, we’re all born innocent, so shouldn’t everyone just get what he or she wants? Shouldn’t only good things happen to everyone?

    Beyond the facts that what is “good” is often in the eye of the beholder, and the “goodness” of what appears to be a “bad” or painful or unfair event is often not revealed until later, all of these good things that should happen are far beyond our control.

    However, there are a lot of shoulds we can control. We can control our own actions and reactions (while of course allowing ourselves to err). We can act in this world how we should according to our own convictions.

    This is how surrendering, far from waving the white flag, becomes the ultimate tool for empowerment and positive action.

    When I was able to stop wallowing in the unfairness of what life dealt me and all of the shoulds that never came to be, my mind was free from the rumination and recrimination that led me into that deep state of depression.

    When I stopped fighting with my situation, my scope and options for positive action became clear, and at that point I was in full control of the little space in life that I actually could control—me.

    I stopped questioning the situation in which I found myself. Some of it was unfair, the result of what I took to be other people’s unjust actions, but at the same time, a lot of it was the result of my own actions, as well as pure chance. While I learned some lessons looking backward, the key to my recovery was accepting where I was and look forward to how to get myself out of it.

    My immediate action was to seek help, first from friends and then from a therapist, something I would have previously stigmatized as self-indulgent. Overcoming the shame of that opened the floodgates of what was possible for me, and everything was up for grabs.

    Within six months of that, I changed so many of the things that were not working for me—my job, my location and my relationships. I crafted a life that worked for me rather than fighting the one that wasn’t.

    By dropping the shoulds, I am now able, in my clear-thinking moments, to act without opposition from life and more quickly move to consider my course of action.

    Not only has this been emotionally liberating, but I know I have made countless better decisions as a result. Each day there are a thousand little victories, all thanks to surrender.

    The logic neat and simple, but the practice is difficult. I get confused and caught up and stuck, but the state of surrender is progressively becoming more and more of my natural default. Some of the lessons and tips I’ve learned to get to this place that I would recommend:

    1. Allow yourself to vent—up to a point.

    As imperfect beings, total, ongoing, and permanent surrender is unrealistic. We will feel negative emotions about experiences not meeting our expectations, and we need to allow ourselves to feel those feelings. It often helps to express them to a sympathetic ear. To a point.

    Venting of negative emotions is useful insofar as it allows us to liberate ourselves of them. However, prolonged or frequent venting can also lend momentum to these feelings. It can actually serve to build up opposition to life by hardening feelings of injury and strengthening those shoulds.

    So, pay attention to your venting. Is it releasing the negative energy around opposition to life, or is it adding to that energy? If you’re the one listening to the venting, ask yourself the same question of the person doing it. If the venting is adding to the negative energy of the situation, consider trying to divert that energy toward something positive and creative.

    2. Remind yourself that surrender is not giving up.

    At the beginning of this blog post I deliberately focused on the commonly used definition and connotations of surrender because of the strong biases language can impart on our subconscious thought.

    Prior to my own awakening, my brief forays into new age thinking and the new consciousness had always ended up with me dismissing it all as a bunch of hokey-ness that turned people into vegetables. If they were always just so accepting of what happened, how could they ever actually accomplish anything difficult or messy or complex?

    I still sometimes revert back to this thinking, but then I recall: surrender is not giving up on life but on fighting with life. Indeed, not surrendering to reality—questioning the fairness, goodness, or logic of the present moment—is crippling. You’re saying “no” to reality: “No, but that’s not fair! It’s not right!” Okay maybe that’s true, but where can you go from there?

    Surrender is saying “yes.” “Yes, I accept that this is a terrible situation, and the way I can make it better is…” This is how surrender becomes the key to taking positive action and frees us from so many of the negative emotions that we strengthen by opposing reality. We don’t say that what’s happening is okay, but we accept that it’s happening and move onto what we can do about it.

    3. Be the happy warrior.

    It’s something of an oxymoron, but the “happy warrior” tends to be more effective vs. the angry warrior, or, what we see more commonly, the person plodding along with grim determination. In fact, the war imagery probably misses the mark altogether, but we all can relate to the happy warrior type, so let’s stick with it.

    When we haven’t surrendered to reality and are still fighting it, negative emotions are inevitable, and we are, by definition, engaging in a futile endeavor. In this case, we become the angry warrior or the grimly determined one. That was me for so many years—I hunkered down, determined to endure all of life’s slings and arrows, all the while missing the joy of the journey.

    Maya Angelou once said, “What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.” If you’re still complaining or not accepting the reality, how can you change that reality? You’re probably still stuck in the complaining phase.

    That aura of negativity or hopelessness that comes with a failure to surrender is, to be blunt, a real turn off for most people. If you want to be the change you want to see in this world and inspire others to a cause, the angry warrior type is probably not going to work.

    This is vitally important in these times of so much social strife, and as fundamental questions of what kind of society we want to be arise every day. Eckhart Tolle has addressed this very point when talking about “angry peace activists” and agents of change.

    Think about some of the most socially impactful figures in the last 100 years—Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Mother Theresa—these are happy warriors.

    Their optimism was infectious in winning people to the cause, and this optimism stemmed from accepting reality as it was and moving on immediately to the “how do we change this?” phase. They began by surrendering.

    Remember the Buddha. While sitting beneath the tree of knowledge, he was able to turn all of Mara’s arrows into flowers and remain in a state of equanimity. In a sense, you too can do that by not turning the obstacles that life puts in your way into personal affronts against you.

    When you accept what life gives you—when you surrender—you avoid creating all of the negativity that rejection entails. You do not disrupt your own peace. From that place of peace, you can affect change.

    In my journey, I eventually wasn’t able to continue fighting life, brought down into depression by the impact of all of those arrows. Nowadays, I can’t say that I immediately accept all that comes my way, but my willingness to surrender to life, if not turning the arrows into flowers, certainly makes the journey more joyful.

    And, when you have joy, you are more likely to achieve the end you seek, or better yet, find peace in the journey regardless of the destination.

    It all starts with surrender.