Did you plan a vacation months in advance, spending money you didn't have, going to a place you thought would be fun, only to come back needing to take MORE time off?
Why do we WAIT until the breaking point before we take the time that we need for ourselves?
Try this: pick a day, any day. Preferably right in the middle of the week, exactly when you think you "can't" take any time away from whatever "important" project you're working on. And just take the day off. Make up an excuse to tell your boss if you have to, but know in your heart that you are doing it for the most important person in just this moment - YOU.
Choose something you love to do, a place you love to be, and do it. You might even find that SLEEP is what you need the most.
Before you say, "NO! I can't possibly do that!", I want you to try it. And see how that small gift to yourself affects your energy, your attitude toward yourself, and the way you treat your coworkers, family, and friends.
When we can finally treat ourselves with genuine kindness and gentleness, maybe we can begin to act with true compassion toward others.
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It seems to me that there's this game we play around the holidays. We somehow feel obligated to replay the old tapes of the past, gathering together in the same ways, repeating the same "traditions", whether or not they still work for us.
The result? A clenching of the jaw, a tensing of our shoulders, a knotted up feeling in our stomach, as we enter this "joyous" holiday season. Some of us might even roll our eyes without knowing it when we say the word "family".
Since all the messages around us are shouting, "Peace! Joy! Love! Thankfulness! Giving!" we feel downright guilty about our deepest truth: we just don't want to do the holidays the same way anymore.
That guilt gnaws at our energy for a good two months. We conduct our surface actions under the weight of the thought, "This is what I have to do." So we suck it up. We buy our plane tickets, or get in our cars, battling the crowds of people who all seem to be happily going to visit family, but very well could be gnawing away inside too.
Or we buy the new sparkly red dress, the high heels, the purse, the whole deal. We show up at the party with all the people we don't even like. We do it anyway. Why? Not exactly by choice, but because we think "we have to".
Or else what?
When was the last time you questioned your own holiday patterns of action and so-called "traditions"?
When was the last time you gave yourself permission to even ask the question, "What do I want to do for the holidays?"
Oh I'm fully aware that there are a group of you who are squirming or rolling your eyes or cursing me out right now as a heretic, a threat to the very fabric of upper middle class suburban culture. I hear you. I grew up surrounded by traditions of a very ancient and foreign culture, and I was not-so-subtly shaped into believing that these needed to be the foundation of my life forever. Or else.
The point isn't whether or not the traditions have any value. The point is, I never considered any other options, purely out of fear. I never even dared ask, "Or else what?"
Until recently. Until I started to look directly in the face of everything I had been avoiding, stepping around, exhausting myself while trying to "do the right thing" all the time.
“You do not have to be good./You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting." These words from Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese might just capture the feeling of dragging yourself through yet another holiday season of obligations. Yeah, right. Easy for her to say. She's a poet.
But can't we all relate to the oppressive feeling of trying to "be good"? Trying to live up to some imaginary ideal of what it means to be a good daughter, a good wife, a good sister-in-law, a good mother?
I know what it's like to feel the threat of literal death as a consequence of disobeying "the rules" of whatever your particular religion is. My religion was family. No one broke the sacred ranks of family. Or else.
Or else what?
Since I never asked, I never found out. Until I actually found the courage to take little steps outward. So my steps weren't that little. I "squandered" an education, for example, by graduating from medical school without a job. Wasting money, wasting time, wasting an education - all of those thoughts, and the accompanying guilt, I confronted many times before and since that decision. And yet, not only have I survived, but I have thrived since that decision. I have, with each decision since then, gotten one step deeper into my own life, closer to my own true self's potential for creativity and service to the world.
Now, after three different careers and many lessons from great teachers, I am less attached to the "outer evidence" of thriving that I used to think were more important than my own feelings. Things like having lots of good shoes, wearing stiff clothes that make me look "important" but are totally confining to my body, and getting the approval of people who have certain credentials and wear those same kinds of clothes.
It took me until I was 33 years old before I was finally able to say calmly, "I will not be travelling anywhere for Thanksgiving this year, and no, I do not have plans to eat a traditional turkey dinner with anyone else." I spent it instead at the beach with a dear friend, sipping hot chocolate and ordering French fries while snuggled in our own corner of a hotel lobby, with not a care in the world nor a restriction on any of our topics of conversation.
It was the most delicious Thanksgiving in recent memory.
I imagined all of my family members, eating off the same dishes, going through the same motions, smiling through the same awkward moments, denying themselves their own true desires, halfway across the country. And I realized that I have now done something they have never done in their lives – I’ve spent Thanksgiving my own way.
I've found my own answer to the question, "Or else what?". It has come to me gradually, and gently, over time. I still notice the old guilt and the old questions coming up, but I know better now. I've experienced something more nourishing than any food I've ever tasted. It's the taste of joy. And the taste of real gratitude, not the obligatory kind.
And isn't that the essense of the holidays we've been trying to create anyway?
I stopped by my post office box this morning after who-knows-how-long. I was expecting to have trouble turning the key on my box, the folded up magazines and edges of post cards shredded by all the successive stuffing and weeks of piling up. I was surprised to see an empty box, except for a single slip of paper saying, "Please claim your mail at the counter."
I stood in line as a young man with tight-fitting jeans, tortoise-shell glasses, a Members Only jacket, and a black Tumi laptop backpack (this was the downtown Palo Alto post office) put one envelope after another on the scale, each certified mail with return receipt, and then wanted to mail two packages overseas Priority Mail. He was taking forever.
And then it was my turn, finally. I extended my hand with the slip of paper and waited. A few minutes later, the woman behind the counter emerged with a white Postal Service carton (the kind the mailmen use in their trucks) between her two hands, resting against her belly. "Here you go," she said cheerily.
"Wow," I said out loud.
I had to look at the physical representation of several weeks (probably a month) of not attending to my previous ritual of checking my business mailbox. Mostly this ritual was about feeling important for having a business mailbox. None of the mail I receive there seems to be addressed to me personally, and all of the bills I receive online. The energy I spend on my P.O. box is primarily spent shredding and throwing things away. It's mostly crap.
I sighed as I tried to make a bundle out of the assorted items in the carton, then carried them, like an infant against my chest, over to another counter to sort through them. I picked a spot right next to the recycling bin. They were predictable things - all the junk mail and marketing solicitations of having a credit card and magazine subscriptions mailed to a P.O. Box. They were also vestiges of my previous life, which consisted of lots of time spent thinking about furniture, clothes, shoes, and travel destinations. So two Pottery Barn catalogs, two Crate and Barrel catalogs, a Restoration Hardware catalog. And of course, two Shar Music catalogs. Why always two? And then the mailings from Yoga Journal. At least four statements saying the same thing – “Your subscription expires a year from now. Will you pay us now? Thank you.”
I went through as much of it as I could at the post office, then brought the rest home. I opened my home mail box also to be greeted by a fully stuffed space.
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Looking at it, having to look straight at it, reminded me that it was unequivocally time. It was time to clean up the crap. Not the pile of mail in front of me. But what the pile of mail represented in my life.
It reminded me of the central image in Iyanla Vanzant's memoir Yesterday, I Cried, and this quote:
"Some people don't know how, and others never think about going back and cleaning up their crap. Most people want to start today and feel better tomorrow. They want to take a yoga class, listen to a meditation tape, rub a crystal on their head, and believe they have fixed their lives and healed their souls. You cannot create a new way of being in one day. You must take your time remembering, cleaning up, and gaining strength."
It hit me that I have been feeling ready to do some remembering. I had built some strength and rather than running forward, it felt like time to clean up some crap.
The arrival of all that mail - the pile of crap on my counter - showed me that without a doubt.
Crap From The Past
In that pile was a 9 by 12 envelope from my brother's medical practice. I opened it, to find a reprint of an issue of MD News, with a full page cover photo of him. "International Leader in Cataract and Refractive Surgery", it said.
He is quoted inside with a several-page feature on his office, with nicely polished professional "candid" shots of him and his staff in various locations in his office.
I recognized all the symbols of success that were represented in that article - just one of many he has accumulated in his career, but for the first time I acknowledged that it doesn't really mean anything to me. You see, he has reached the Promised Land - the land of all the promises that were made during our childhoods about how to have a "better" life. I grew up in a household filled with fierce ambition, the challenge of cultural barriers, the intense desire for success, the pride of family lineage, and unwavering work ethic. All "good" things.
But I also grew up in a household with volatile emotional outbursts, occasional threats of physical violence, and constant angst about not doing, having, or being enough. The message from our parents was mixed: on the one hand - go and assimilate and become successful in American society, acquire friends (while miraculously never leaving the house), speak English with an American accent, blend in, be valued for the content of your mind and not the color of your skin. On the other - "be happy" somehow, even though we have no idea how to teach you to do this, since we never stopped to do that work for ourselves. And since we don't know how, we'll just project onto you all the ways we learned to survive in our culture - work hard, get the highest education possible, hold down a job, raise a family, hope for a better future for your children.
So the image of my brother on the cover of that magazine spoke to checking all those boxes. And of course I am proud of him. I am amazed by his ability to achieve what he has in his life. I am grateful for his presence as an influence to me.
But for the first time in my life, he is no longer a model for me. He is no longer the example of How Things Should Be for me. I see myself as on my own journey, and one that he may never be able to name. And that's OK.
It has taken me awhile to feel this way. And still sometimes I don't feel strong enough to stand in my own truth while in the overwhelmingly loud presence of everything my family purportedly valued. It's psychologically so precarious to be at the cusp of knowing two different ways of living, to have stepped out of a pattern enough to observe it, and to have peacefully chosen to let those ideas go. I'm an adult, I say to myself. Loving myself should be enough for me, I say to myself. And it is on most days, until I am faced with the actual prospect of standing there, in front of all the crap, some of it even flying into my face.
Crap Along The Path
I am on a path of recovering my true nature - which is joy. I am on a path of remembering all the ways that I have denied myself in the past, so that I may release those patterns and start choosing a different way of life.
I am on a path of observing the Self. I know that the truth in my heart is valid, and it holds the key to living a life that only I can. I know that things can only change when I truly accept everything as it is right now. "Acceptance" is a relatively unfamiliar term for me. In the past, I've rarely been able to "accept" things if it means surrender or defeat. I was raised to win, to be on top, not to roll over and play dead.
What I've come to realize about "acceptance" is that it actually requires a lot more courage than "needing to win and come out on top". Acceptance requires the willingness to stand tall and look directly into every aspect of a situation as it is, and to allow the process of naming it to occur.
You see, as Iyanla says, "you cannot create a new way of being in one day." So the process of acceptance, and eventually change, takes time.
Isn't it so much easier to put on a smile, start talking positive, and give people advice about how to be happier? Isn't it so much easier to have a project, have a business, and feel important?
Yes, it is. Until it isn't anymore.
The Truth Behind The Crap
What I'm beginning to realize about myself is that I am an artist and a teacher. These are the exact two things that no one in my family ever wanted me to be. In fact, I was instructed specifically not to dare consider these things as possibilities. Why? Too hard. Not enough respect. Not enough money. Not a good use of my brain. Not enough to justify my parents’ sacrifices of moving to this country, giving up everything they could have been.
Now I could go into a whole piece on where those reasons came from. But I'm really more interested in my own business. I can't really know what motivates another person, or how they have come to believe what they believe. What I can inquire into, however, is how I came to accept and believe those thoughts so deeply that it took me 26 years to muster the courage to take a step away, and another 8 years to realize that my life has been governed by a different version of those same beliefs, and another year to wake up to the fact that if I don't clean up some of the crap, I'll be buried in it.
How do I know that I am an artist and a teacher? Because when given total freedom and unlimited time, I create and I think of ways to share it. I don't think about "marketing" or "selling" or social media. I have learned those tools because along with being a teacher comes the task of being a great learner. I am not afraid of trying new things. I am not afraid of practice. I am not afraid of discipline. I am not afraid of starting over. I am learning to channel my practice and discipline into developing the skills of treating myself more kindly, honoring myself more fully, and allowing myself the space to be exactly who I am, complete in this moment.
"Exactly who I am in this moment". Now that's another hard one to swallow. I see now that my whole life was driven by the engine of this belief: "There's never enough." It applied to everything. There's not enough time. There's not enough money. There's not enough respect. There's not enough recognition. There's not enough sleep. This was my lens for viewing my purpose in life – No matter what it took, I was going to be, do, and have enough!
With that determination, I set out to achieve my dreams. What I didn't realize was that, since I hadn't sat down to really look at the crap and clean it up, my brain was still operating with the thought, "There's never enough." So every time I built something up to the point where I was able to say, "That's enough for me," and listened to the call to move in a different direction, an old part of my brain tried to save me by saying, "Remember, there's never enough."
This came in different forms. At first it was, "You're not enough." Meaning, just deciding for myself that I wanted to do something was not a good enough reason to do it. Someone else had to be involved. Someone else's approval had to be gained. Someone else had to sign off and say it was OK.
Then it was, "You don't know enough." I got over that one by throwing myself into the fire of improvisation. When you're there in a group and NOBODY KNOWS, it's very freeing. I started putting myself out there and improvising my life into being.
Then it was, "You're not doing enough." The constant undertow of these thoughts would still undermine any attempt I made to follow the quiet voice of intuition and creativity. Whenever I sat down at my computer to do one thing, my mind would trigger the thought, "You're not doing enough," and pull me to start another task, or write another item on my To Do list.
I was done reading tips and pointers on how to change behaviors. Tips on how to organize clutter, how to schedule the day for better productivity, how to set up systems to be successful at marketing...all of these were boring me to the core.
It occurred to me, after disengaging myself from the perpetual machine of marketing courses and self-proclaimed gurus trying to teach others what worked for them, that my deepest desire is simply to tell my story. And a true teacher - or true artist - tells stories in order to illuminate some new way of seeing, new way of experiencing, that leads the student in a new direction. A true teacher - or true artist - holds a light up, but does not presume to know what path the student needs to take. A true teacher rests in not knowing what's best for the student, and only knowing that this acknowledgment can empower the student to find their own true way.
Celebrate The Crap
We so want to see hope expressed as an answer.
We want that "start today, feel better tomorrow" promise.
If someone offers it, it feels so appealing, because it appears to get us "there" without our having to know or do or remember or clean up any of the crap.
But the crap doesn't just clean itself up. It stays, and it starts to smell, and it builds up, until one day you realize you can't even find the door to get out. It's blocked. But this is a day to celebrate, because on the day you can finally see the pile of crap, on the day you finally can't step around it anymore, on the day you just can't breathe because of the stench, it's a birth day. It's a day that you become aware. It's a day that you can finally choose to pick up the shovel, roll up your sleeves, and start cleaning up the crap.
OK, I admit it. I was disappointed. I was disappointed when Tiger Woods, just a few short months after the "SUV incident" outside his home in Florida, staged a press conference, stood behind a podium, and recited a canned apology written in corporate-speak by the damage-control PR spin doctors at Nike. Like a dutiful boy, he was dressed in a suit, clean-shaven, looking humble and respectful to the corporate sponsors who made his public career that much more lucrative.
But beneath the surface was a whole story waiting to be uncovered, spoken, and shared.
I secretly (and not so secretly) cheered Tiger on when he hit the apparent depths of his personal crisis - the extent of his adultery revealed, the intensity of the pain he has kept hidden beneath the socially acceptable, corporate endorsement-worthy veneer of relentless competitiveness and focus.
I saw this as an opportunity for Tiger to deliver his real "medicine" to the world, and to show us how a hero falls, journeys through the abyss of his own self-discovery, and emerges whole in a different way. With a different message about heroicism, with a more solid foundation on which to stand, with a deeper message than can be conveyed merely by counting wins and trophies.
I secretly thought, "Wow, now THIS is Tiger's real moment." I thought he would go into seclusion and embark on a healing journey, away from the limelight, away from golf, away from his lifelong drugs of choice - winning and getting public recognition.
I'm reminded of the David Whyte poem, "The Well of Grief":
"Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
...will never know the source from which we drink,
...nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else."
I secretly thought, "This is Tiger's 'well of grief' moment. I can't wait to see what emerges from the bottom of this."
Just weeks later, I walked by a television tuned into ESPN and saw Tiger back on the golf course, competing in the Masters. There were casual remarks from the commentators about this "comeback", but for the most part it was "business as usual". He had the emotionless expression of competition on his face, as always. There was no evidence of anything that had transpired in the news just weeks earlier. He was back to "doing his job".
And what message are we, the public, supposed to take away from this "heroic" return to the "job" of business as usual? Has Tiger put the incident behind him now? Should we simply leave his private life alone, and just focus on being entertained by his golf skills? Is this the model of courage that we're expecting from our public heroes, sports or otherwise?
All of it disappointed me.
I have felt for the past several weeks that there is something inside me that wants to find expression. There are words that want to find their way into the world, to give life and breath to the truth in my heart. They get caught somewhere in my chest, my shoulders, my throat. And I've been feeling into the reasons why.
This week I realized it's because I was hoping someone like Tiger would make it OK to be a public figure, someone who has attained legendary status through hard work, competitiveness, and discipline to develop his talents, someone who has achieved beyond anyone's wildest expectations - to acknowledge his own humanness. To show that even a legend shares the tenderness of the human condition. To demonstrate that no matter how high you fall from, you can get up, and you can emerge whole, with an equally powerful message from your moments of weakness as from your moments of strength.
Instead, he took the corporate political entertainment route. He dusted himself off, put on a fresh shirt, and stepped right back out there on the stage. "The show must go on," as the old adage says.
But what I feel we are so hungry for - the show we wish we could see, in all honesty and transparency and without any regard for entertainment value - is the show of even one person's truth, undramatized. Yes, the pain. Yes, the journey of living through the pain. Yes, the fear. And the journey of moving through fear. Yes, the joy and peace and freedom that emerge in the only way that nature works - by going through it.
I am aware that maybe I'm so disappointed in Tiger's choices because I have a deep longing for permission to do what I know I need to do. I've been waiting for some signal that I'll be OK, that it'll be OK, if I start to talk about what I've really learned about myself, and how I've really discovered my own sources of joy and peace. How everything I once thought to be absolutely true has come into question, and how I have been slowly, day by day, setting myself free. How I have had to look at every painful belief I've held so tightly, how I have trained myself to become more familiar with these beliefs, so that I might gently let them go, and love myself for doing so. How I've managed to cycle through this work with curiosity, openness, and willingness to endure whatever I've needed to in order to reveal the next layer of peace.
But there are parts of it that I'm afraid will look ugly, that will brand me as a "bad" person, that will confirm to the world how I failed in some way, that will concede my own defeat.
And yet I know there is freedom on the other side of telling the truth, being able to name not only what brings me alive, but what breaks my heart. I learned this myself last year at a weekend called "Real Speaking", where I stood among 6 important strangers and practiced publicly speaking my heart's truth. Most of my words got caught in my throat, when I got to the really juicy stuff. It was caught there by fear. I couldn't even name the fear at that time, but now I am closer. I am more prepared, strengthened by my daily practice of comparatively new muscles called trust, peace, and allowing. I feel that something is about to be hatched, to be born, from my finding a voice for these words. There is such fear attached to not knowing what will come out, not knowing how I'll steel myself for the response of letting it out for the world to see.
And so I sit with my disappointment in Tiger. Since he didn't become the model I wanted him to be, I am left with finding the inspiration within myself - the knowledge that what my heart has to say is of value in the world. With or without corporate sponsors.
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"My most relaxing time is when I'm sitting on the couch watching TV. What's YOUR most relaxing time?", asked 11-year-old Aaron.
I paused, then said, "Well, I meditate every morning. So that's my most relaxing time." I was a little hesitant to say it because I didn't know how an 11-year-old boy would react to the word "meditate".
"How do you meditate?" he asked.
"Oh you're too young, you don't need to learn how to meditate yet." I waved my hand and smiled, thinking he would want to move on to other "cooler" subjects.
"You know what I heard? If you meditate 15 minutes a day, it'll change your life," he said, his eyes widening a little. "Did it change YOUR life?"
"Yes, it did. It completely changed my life." I smiled and nodded. Now I recognized that I was speaking with a fellow human spirit, and that I had incorrectly assumed that because of his age, and being a boy, he wouldn't be interested in the same human subjects I'm interested in. I also caught myself doing something that I had always found annoying as a child - whenever an adult waved off my question with the phrase, Oh don't worry about it, you're too young to need to know. The reality, I saw, is that this fellow human spirit was full of curiosity, playfulness, and desire to know the truth, just like I was.
"Can you make things glow now?" he asked, waving his hands in front of him like a magician.
"No, not yet!" I laughed. "But I have seen some magic in my life."
He seemed satisfied with that answer. My cousin, his mother, told me that she had selected some sections of the audiobook Eat Pray Love to play for them. The parts she thought they might enjoy.
And I was surprised. Playing Eat Pray Love for a pre-adolescent boy?? Really??
But she was quite serious. We talked more, and I discovered that she is in a fascinating situation with her 13-year-old, 11-year-old, and 5-year-old sons. They are one of the only Asian families in their central Wisconsin farming suburb called Delafield. All the other parents assume that since she is Asian, and her sons do well in school, that she must be grooming the boys to go to Harvard and MIT.
"No, I'm not," says my cousin. She has had them in Montessori school ever since her boys were young and they were living in Princeton, New Jersey, where she was shocked and disgusted by a culture of 3-year-olds doing math problems and memorizing flash cards.
"I know what it's like to be focused all on grades and academics. I went through that system in Taiwan," my cousin says as we walk down the sidewalk in downtown Menlo Park, California. It's demographically not that unlike Princeton, New Jersey, here - an affluent suburb next to a major university - and I'm sure the parents here face as much challenge in searching their souls for the right balance of educational values for their children. In fact, I know this from founding a school and teaching 3-year-olds violin in this very ZIP code.
"I had no space to nurture my creativity. I had no freedom to do that. I spent all those hours of my life studying, memorizing, cramming. I told our school principal that if we want to compete in this country, we need to compete on our creativity and freedom. Forget about competing in math and science, because the Asian kids are already three years ahead of all our kids anyway," my cousin continues. I'm riveted on her every word. "But the kids in Asia will never catch up on their creativity, because you can't teach it. And you can't cram for it. You've got to nurture it, day after day."
I felt my heart open in hearing her say these words. I wanted to hear more. It was a fresh, real perspective on Asian and American education, from someone who's grown up in both worlds.
She filled me in on details of her life I'd never had the chance to talk to her about before. I knew she had moved to the U.S. as a teenager. Turns out it was age 17, after taking the college entrance exam in Taiwan. She wanted to study biology, but her English was not fast enough for her to keep up with the reading at the college level. She was able to switch to engineering because her math skills were not impacted by language barriers.
"So I switched to engineering, not because I liked it, but because I needed to in order to survive. I would have flunked out of college if I stayed in biology, but that's what I was interested in." She chose industrial engineering because it involved a human element.
But she worked on a manufacturing room floor for two years after college. "Talk about not being in my world! I was totally out of my element. So I know what it's like to have to do something that you don't really like, but just need to for survival."
She now works in a global services role within a major multinational corporation, part-time as she raises the boys. "So I'm interacting with people all the time, different people. It works for me. But I'm not going to push my kids to the Ivy League. I'm going to encourage them to find the school that's right for them, to study what they want to learn, what they like."
Maybe the biggest changes we can hope to see in our lives come between generations, not in single lifetimes. I can't know since I don't have children yet, but it was a breath of fresh air to hear my cousin's intentions as a parent. Next year the family moves to Shanghai for a stint of 3 to 5 years. The kids will attend an International School, and be prepared for college in a foreign environment. I can't wait to hear what unfolds.
And I can't wait to watch what just one generation of change will bring for those boys.
Are you on a fast track to nowhere?
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I recently watched the movie Talledega Nights again. It's a masterpiece in so many ways, but now, as a life coach, I see a different layer of wisdom in the story of Ricky Bobby.
We live in a culture that teaches us about winning. We worship winners. We are scared to death of losing. We avoid it like the plague.
I'm not sure when the American Dream became inflated to this point, or if it was always like this and I'm just noticing it now. But the fancy ZIP codes, the latest fashions, the plastic surgery, the fitness programs, the high-paying jobs, the flashy cars...all of these toys and amusements, which have become SO glamorous and fun as the demand for them has gone up, are substitutes for the relationships we are seeking with ourselves.
As I look around at our human condition, I see that we share a common need to belong. We share a common need to feel loved. We share a common need to love someone or something, and be able to express it. And we share a common need to tell the truth in our hearts.
The problem is, we're not taught to acknowledge what we truly need. We buy into the concept that if we just keep racing to win, we'll have everything we ever thought we needed.
Well, have you ever gotten to the very top of your game, accomplished the goals that have been put in front of you, and still ended up feeling empty? If you know what I'm talking about, then read on.
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The Hero's Journey
Ricky Bobby is a winner. We meet him at the beginning of the film as the seed for needing to win is first planted in his mind. His absentee father, a race-car driver, shows up for a brief moment in his elementary school classroom and tells his son, "If you ain't first, you're last."
The words make an indelible imprint on the young Ricky, and it leads to a career as a champion race-car driver. He's on the fast track, literally. He lives in a McMansion with a pool and a circular driveway, owns a boat and more cars than he can drive, and has a hot wife and two kids. He has all the trappings of what material success looks like in America.
As long as the prize money keeps rolling in, it's all good.
The problem arises when a foreigner invades his racing kingdom and threatens to dethrone him.
Ricky has a minor injury, but doesn't allow his physical condition to overpower his ingrained zeal to win. He's on the fast track, remember? And he won't be stopped by anything.
He powers through.
When Ricky suffers a devastating crash, and it appears that his racing career is over, he loses everything that once defined him - his house, his wife, his best friend, his career.
The Hero Sits Down
Humiliated, Ricky moves in to his mother's house, takes a job as a pizza deliveryman, and is left to mope around in an unfamiliar, egoless state.
He encounters his father, who has come back to redeem his lifelong absenteeism and teach Ricky a few lessons about winning.
The Hero Learns To Love...Himself
This part of the film is where we watch Ricky get life coaching. His coaches come in the form of his father, his mother, and a former employee - all of whom show him aspects of the love he has been seeking for himself through the substitute of "winning".
He faces his fear by learning to drive with a wild cougar inside his car. He learns to feel by driving blindfolded. He learns the value of clarity and compassion when his own mother takes over the parenting of his two foul-mouthed, defiant sons.
The final "aha" moment happens when a former employee runs into Ricky at a local bar and reveals what she has always seen in him - the love of racing, and the true spirit of a winner, who races for the love and not the prize money.
It's a hilariously cheesy moment in the film, complete with a soundtrack from "White Snake", but it's the melodrama of recognizing your own essential self that's being conveyed. It's the moment we all long to experience for ourselves. It's what we need to keep growing, keep risking, keep living - we need to be reminded of how to really love ourselves. And when we see glimpses of our essential self, it always feels like love.
There Is No Finish Line...
The fact that Ricky's final race with his foreign nemesis ends in a scratch result (both drivers disqualified for leaving their cars) is a beautiful way to convey the ambiguity of what it means to "win" in life, versus being declared a "winner". The only result that matters to Ricky is the acknowledgment of his essential self's true love of racing, and that he is free to be first or last, without fear of losing love.
At a time when our nation is lamenting the loss of teens to senseless suicides, discussing the problems of bullying, and exposing the dark side of our achievement culture, maybe it's also time to ask, "Whose race are we in? And how will we know when we've won?"
Take a moment to remember what you truly love. It will point you toward the only finish line that matters....living a life you can call your own.
This morning, as I was driving to the grocery store, there were these thoughts running through my head:
"What if I could just relax into ACCEPTANCE of myself, exactly as I am right now?"
"What if I could treat myself as if right now, exactly as everything is, it IS all exactly as it should be?"
I was trying to examine my recent thought patterns which were centered around "concern" for a variety of things in my life: was I spending enough time doing the right things, was I doing enough yoga, was I eating enough fruit and vegetables, was I working hard enough on the right things for my business, was I spending too much time on "non-productive" activities....
The list went on and on, and nothing seemed to be "clicking" or "flowing" during the past few weeks until the rare moments when I just let go and did the ONE thing right in front of me.
This morning, I was thinking about the feeling and energy around doing JUST THIS, RIGHT NOW. What is it about that thought which creates flow? It's certainly not a state of heightened anxiety and pushing and grasping. It's not an energy of worrying.
It's exactly the opposite. It's LETTING GO of all the worrying and relaxing the mind completely.
The mind - mine at least - wants to quantify and list and remind me of everything that still ISN'T done, NEEDS to be done, SHOULD be done. The mind isn't designed to be still and quiet. Its job, for which I’ve trained it systematically throughout a lifetime of schooling and high performance, is to be a machine constantly generating new thoughts, forming associations, laying down memories, accessing old information, recalling it on demand.
The mind is a beautiful thing...some of the time.
But then there are times when it gets in the way.
So back to this morning. I was breathing into that feeling of imagining if I could regard myself, as I was right in that moment -- driving my car, with my bank account, my number of clients, my schedule, my health, EVERYTHING about me -- as exactly the way things should be, in fact the ONLY way they could be.
What would that feel like? Who could I be if I felt that way toward me in this moment?
And then the phone rang. It was my friend Louise (that’s not her real name, but she’s a real friend).
She called to talk because she was having difficulty with a family situation across the country. She was being pained by the thought, "I wish I could be there. I just don't know if I should be here right now."
It was causing her to look at everything in her surroundings as "not right". The noisy neighbors, the cars going by on the street, the dogs barking. Nothing felt right as she experienced the world through the lens of thinking, "I shouldn't be here right now."
As I listened to her agonize over this, it occurred to me and I gently reminded her, "Louise, the only place you can be right now is exactly where you are."
"Oh that feels so good to hear. It feels like peace," she said.
And as I took in the reality of those words myself, I saw that wishing you could be anywhere else, right now, is fighting reality. When you're fighting, you know how you feel. Just imagine it. You're at war. You're battling. You're kicking and screaming, wishing it would be over soon.
Who wants to be around a person who's fighting right now? Not me. And how much time do we spend in our thoughts, fighting who we are right now? That was where my mind had been taking me so often during the past few weeks, believing and dwelling in thoughts about what was missing, what wasn’t arriving, what hadn’t been done.
There is such wisdom in the peace and space of RIGHT NOW. Louise could decide in the next minute that she is going to go through the steps to move herself from being here to being with her family: purchase a plane ticket, pack her bags, get herself to the airport, and so on.
But RIGHT NOW she is here. Until she settles into that feeling and accepts what she can do from the perfect place of RIGHT HERE, she is trapped in her own world of fighting with reality. Disconnected from herself and therefore less available for the family she loves so much.
I also asked her to consider what possibilities for healing were contained in the reality of her being HERE while her family is THERE right now. Could it be that her different perspective, several thousand miles removed from the hospital, doctors, and other distressed family members, is in fact a healing energy for the ones she loves the most and wants to take care of? Does she absolutely KNOW that she "needs to" be THERE, and not right here, right now?
The answer was "No."
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NO Thinking...Just Listening, and Play
Our talk led to a discussion of negative thinking that she has been noticing related to a different part of her life – her romantic relationships. "I've been thinking ‘It won't happen’ or ‘It'll never work out’, and I realize that I'm blocking things from coming to me. What were you thinking when all those good things happened to you this summer?"
"It was NO thinking!" I blurted out.
And it felt like such an opening, a blossoming realization to say that out loud! NO thinking!
After hearing that phrase for the first time over a year ago in relation to the state of improvisation, I felt like I finally got it, on a whole life level, today.
NO thinking is SPACE. It's not filling yourself up with affirmations, or convincing yourself to get rid of negative thoughts (which I've found always involves some level of self-castigation). It's not ADDING anything to your already active mind.
It's simply becoming empty. And we rage against emptiness because we are taught to be so fearful of having nothing at all.
I have felt the complete joy and freedom of empty mind when I've been in a state of pure listening and improvisation. It feels so good.
So good, in fact, that it feels criminal or forbidden. I've asked, "Is it true that life really is this good??" in disbelief, my mind wanting evidence to prove it could start punishing me.
Now I know that the true nature of life feels good, when we experience it from the SPACE of NO thinking.
And two things I read this week have come together to complete this picture. Both are from the Tibetan spiritual teacher, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, author of the book, Tibetan Sound Healing.
The first - Letting go.
It's such a popular term now, thrown around in yoga classes and self-help workshops all the time. Rinpoche says that when we say, "Let go", we usually focus on what we are parting with, rather than what is revealed, when we let something go. In other words, we dwell on the loss, instead of dwelling on the beauty of the new possibility unveiled.
The second - Effortless doubts and spontaneous problems.
We are so quick to believe that things will go wrong, and problems will arise. We might even accept the mantra that life just has to be hard, and that’s just the way it is. Rinpoche says, "Everybody understands effortless doubts and spontaneous problems. We always seem to have some good reasons for doubt - intelligent, educated, and philosophically profound reasons."
But when it comes to feeling joy, compassion, or love, we suddenly need proof. We seem to believe that none of these qualities can *spontaneously* manifest or effortlessly arise. It is easier for us to imagine having a problem than it is to imagine being happy without a particular reason.
And so, it’s time to ask yourself, is it true? Can you absolutely know that your doubts are TRUE? Can you absolutely know that joy cannot arise spontaneously, but problems can?
I invite you to explore your own answer to these questions.
Meanwhile, what I found today for myself was the feeling of SPACE from NO thinking. And I'm going to rest there right now.
