This is not the beginning, it’s where I’ve chosen for you to start. It is not the root of the tree, but the fork, where my life diverged from the path I had selected to that point. In time, you will learn of “before,” so that you can understand “during” and “after.”
You can remember some things perfectly clearly. The tone of voice is absolutely pristine, saying more than the words themselves. During the moment, learning you’re breaking up with someone is tough enough. You think of the time you spent together, instances you could have seen it coming—or trusted your instincts to get out—and how a foreseeable future with someone you really cared about vanished into thin air.
You are faced with a difficult change. You know something just isn’t right. You decide to look within and grow.
I have been on a long path of self-examination for nearly three years now, beginning when I opened my mind to meditation after reading No Time To Lose by Pema Chodron just weeks before I closed my business with bankruptcy looming. Closing my eyes and focusing on my breath as it passed through my nostrils was the only way I could calm my brain enough to sleep. (In retrospect, it helped me handle the destruction of all I’d worked for with calm “professionalism,” as an acquaintance wrote.)
When that breakup occured, I chose to push further. I decided to search for the answers to my questions, seek the truth about myself and move forward. What I thought required a few tweaks instead generated a true me, built from the ground up.
Just how far down does the rabbit hole go? MeGeneration tells you what I’ve found and how.
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You must understand your life will have eras of ascension and decline, punctuated my “high” and “low” experiences. Some say they’re ordered like seasons. It’s important to figure out what creates those cycles, both internally and externally.
Sometimes you need help.
I decided to avail myself of John Assaraf’s Having It All Challenge a few weeks after the breakup. I had grand ideas of what it would bring me: more income, a better outlook and the accountability to achieve the myriad dreams that stream through my head. I ventured into the six-month process with little in the way of defined targets for any of these fantastic goals, save one. I remember distinctly telling myself I would be satisfied if I could feel better connected to God.
I’ve been a person of faith all my life, though my family went through fits and starts when it came to regular attendance on Sundays. God has been a part of my belief system as I’ve grown up, though I will admit to asking a lot of questions. I have traced a winding, inquisitive path marked by what I perceived as a lack of faith when it comes to building a relationship with the Creator. I realize now it was simply a lack of understanding.
In that way, I consider the Challenge a raging success.
Throughout the program, participants are bombarded with content on all fronts. There’s much to do and learn. Shifting a mindset developed over years—or decades—takes a lot of time and effort, more than I conceived of at first. The toughest lesson to grasp, one which I feel I’ve only come to really comprehend in the last few weeks, is sometimes you must go back to move forward.
Bursting at the seams with confidence and hope in May, I hit July with less energy than a cyclist pedaling past the halfway point in a Tour de France mountain stage. Churning with all my might, I seemed to be hovering in one place—unhappy with a job rumors surfaced I’d be fired from, feeling my mind partially disconnected from my body and wholly frustrated. What the hell was wrong?
Mercifully, something clicked.
I was on a weekly conference call, trying desperately to listen to something I knew was important. My mind was elsewhere, remembering a conversation I’d had earlier in the day with a coworker about “the one that got away.” (Or, to say it the way I’d acted for seven years, “The one I kick the shit out of myself for screwing up with.”) As the gentleman being interviewed, Jeff Gignac, went on discussing the importance of choosing our words and realizing the impact of the stories we tell ourselves—something I firmly believe in—I finally asked myself the right question…
“Why are you still carrying this stuff?”
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You give everything weight. Every experience, every possession, every relationship has a certain mass in your life, ultimately chosen by you. Each piece of material, whether physical or psychological, is given a value based on significance and emotional impact. The birth of your children and your first kiss tip the scales more than some order you placed at Starbucks or being cut off on the highway, yet all of them have a designated place and load.
Day by day, mostly without making a conscious decision, you accumulate this stuff.
Very slowly, I began asking myself questions. It is unlikely any of us will ever fully discard our past, barring severe retrograde amnesia, and it’s debatable how beneficial it could be (regardless of how appealing the thought). Without my past, I’d be unable to look back over the peaks and valleys of my life to see how far I’d come.
Realizing I would always carry these things, I decided to make them lose weight.
I wrote letters. Ex-girlfriends, ex-bosses, any situation which I gave undue negative emotional importance got a note of some kind. I explained how I felt and why, then acknowledged my responsibility (no matter how little) in allowing these things to affect me and expressed forgiveness as I released these “excess pounds.”
It was liberating to finally unpin and throw the grenades bouncing around my head and let the explosions create acceptance of unchangeable past…and shape the foundation for glorious future.
Standing quietly in the photo gallery of my mind, I looked around the room for connections between the images and the present day. This is where the inquisition gained momentum. “How does this snapshot relate to that older one?” Each “breakthrough” was, in actuality, the next nesting doll which had to be opened to reveal an event further back.
This process of “personal archaeology”* was necessary to determine how I got where I am and what’s useful for the future. “Temet nosce,” as the Oracle says. By figuring out which experiences unconsciously shaped my values, I am exchanging noxious for valuable and buttressing the helpful.
This is a solid base for growth…and the point from where MeGeneration will move forward.
*Copyright 2010. (I’m half-joking. I like the phrase a lot.)
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Last Thursday morning, I was called to deliver some items to her hospital room so her brief stay for a routine procedure would be more comfortable. My grandmother had a severe stroke in July of 2008 that robbed her of the ability to use her left arm and leg. Over the last 18+ months, her mind has oscillated between clarity and confusion, punctuated by spells of visits from her mother, husband and others who have passed on.
I sat beside the bed and gently rubbed her hand. We discussed the weather, my job search and her concerns about my youngest brother’s first child. As I stood to leave, I kissed her on the head and told her I loved her. She strained to return the affectionate words and unintentionally reminded me how much I have changed:
“Be happy.”
“I am,” I said reflexively with a grateful smile. It struck me how good it felt to speak that truth and, in doing so, to realize how far I’ve come for it to be more than a hollow statement to allay someone else’s worries. As I made my way home, I went over the keys to this shift.
Make the decision.
Yes, being happy starts with a choice. As a matter of fact, everything does. It’s just a matter of whether you do so by willful intention or unconscious commission. The knock-on effect of your selections leads to your circumstances.
Think constructively.
Paying your bills or raising your children isn’t made any easier—or more effective—by worrying. Be mindful of the possibilities within your control instead of blissfully ignorant of—or crushed under—a situation’s gravity. Understand what you can do instead of focusing on what you can’t.
Practice active hopefulness.
The growing popularity of The Secret has misled some that things fall together with a good dose of positive mental attitude. While mindset is important, the key is to realize your active role in your life. Don’t sit in traffic and hope cars miss you.
In the beginning, you’ll do small stuff. Maybe you’ll read books or seek out an education of some kind. Perhaps you’ll focus primarily on keeping your frame of mind right at first. These steps will probably seem inconsequential, but so does that first bit of snow that causes an avalanche.
Take a minute to think. What can you do today to get the ball rolling?
The immutable power of your life is choice.
From second to second, you are selecting one option from another. More often than not, this based on your operating system. Your brain’s Windows 7 (or OS X, for you Mac users) handles a large percentage—some say 96%—of your daily operations.
Built up over years, your “neurological software” filters information to limit your brain’s conscious awareness to a handful of items.
On your computer, the updates you receive from Microsoft or Apple are the culmination of months of work. A problem is identified, then several fixes are attempted by rewriting line after line of code until the best solution is agreed upon. This correction is usually made with a quick download (and occasionally a restart), so the process of change is largely hidden from you. The hours and hours of typing and testing, then retyping and retesting done by a team of well-trained and experienced indivivuals saves you the effort.
Not so when it comes to your life.
If you’ve spent your life taking insults to heart and ignoring praise based on the source—or even your own valuation of your quality or worthiness—you’ve made a decision. Granted, in our youth, our parents and guardians have a large influence on our minds and things were shaped without our conscious control.
You’re an adult now.
Exercise your right to choose what you internalize and pursue, what you accept and discard. You may have to update your software and evaluate all the commands deep in your brain. It’s necessary. Shifting line after line of these calculations will give you different results.
It’s necessary. Do the work. Take the time.
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Your brain is always working.
Whether interpreting the millions upon millions of sensations affecting you every second or controlling the movement of your digestive system or contemplating the positions of galaxies, it is impossible to shut off. Death is the only event that will completely close down operations.
You can slow it down.
Sit quietly for a few minutes. Close your eyes. Feel the breath passing in and out your nostrils. Keep at it as long as you can. Even as you do your best to silence everything, your brain still chatters, doesn’t it? It comments on the room temperature, it speaks about the strangeness of your current activity, it meanders into future errands or past happenings.
You’re waiting for nothing.
Doing this exercise, shifting your brain into another gear, is how you get “there.” It’s a silent meadow, where thoughts flutter in like butterflies, only to flit away without any judgment whatsoever. This place and time is really neither. The absence of “good” or “bad” yields the presence of is. Each idea is. Each feeling is. Each moment is.
This is how things change.
Like an old damn giving way, history breaks through. It is seen differently, with more compassion and even reverence. It is a root experience that, when necessary, is tilled from the garden. Anger last minutes instead of hours. Disappointments fade in hours instead of days.
This is the power of nothing.
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Everything is old.
It has always been here. Physics tells us that a closed system, like our universe, will always have the exact same amount of energy. Further, we know it has been expanding for somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 billion years…containing the same amount of stuff. That means, in the first millisecond (about 1/40 of the time it takes you to blink) after creation everything that ever was, is or will be inhabited a tiny—yet rapidly expanding—cosmos.
Everything is arranged.
Matter is simply an organized form of energy, a bunch of atoms that slowed down enough to appear solid…to appear solid. This “everything” is paradoxically made up of “something” and a remarkable amount of “nothing.” Accelerated to the speed of light squared, you’d be millions upon millions of times more powerful than a bolt of lightning.
Everything is connected.
Occasionally, we are reminded of our opus and the scope of our wonderful lives. All is inextricably tied together, molded from an eternal image. What makes you “you” and me “me” is a sliver of the Creator given boundaries. What was timeless is made to play by rules of hours and days it struggles to comprehend. What was boundless is now limited by the reach of clumsy extremities to inches and feet. We fight impatience, feeling somewhere deep down all is within reach yet knowing everything must be put in order.
Everything moves with you.
Toss aside the belief that anything is against you. You are a part of everything! It shifts to accommodate you—what matters is the direction you face. Like an airliner cutting across the sky, the space will be filled behind you. Whether you take off heading east or west, uphill or down, everything will support you. It parts before you and gathers behind you so that you might push forward.
This is the power of everything.
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