The Foundations of Life

“If you knew who walked beside you, on this path that you have chosen, you would never experience fear or doubt again.”

-A Course In Miracles

Imagine that everything you do with your life is equivalent to building a spectacular structure.  Each decision you make, each relationship you create, and what you do and say are all alterations and additions to the structure.  As creative beings, we have the ability to speak and act and make things manifest in the world; and so we actually have a degree of freedom about what our buildings look like.  You may be working on a massive modern skyscraper, and other people may only be interested in building a cottage by the sea.  If you have no idea what you want to create in your life, a great question to start with is: What would I love to make my life about?  However, this article is not about the structure of our lives, but the foundation.

If we were to look at laying an actual foundation for a building, what are the most important elements?  It strikes me that we would want to find ground that was solid and unmoving.  So, sand and mud are probably not our best bets, but rock and solid dirt are likely much better choices.  Similarly you are going to want to find some solid material like concrete with re-bar for the actual foundation.  It all basically comes down to solid unchanging ground, and solid unchanging material that is shock absorbent.

Now, I’m going to invite you to think about the kind of material you are building your life on top of.  Most of us start out in life thinking we have a rock solid foundation. Often they are even very solid sounding things, such as our family, or a good education, or a secure job, or a happy marriage, or great physical health.  We attach our joy, peace, and well-being to these foundational materials.  Then of course, as we go the way of life, storms inevitably hit, circumstances change, and our structures crack and crumble; sometimes they even topple over.  We then think that life is inherently unstable.  We make up that the world is a scary place.  When in reality circumstances are the only things that are actually unstable. They simply make poor material for your foundation because the nature of circumstances is that they change.  It’s like building your life on quick sand. 

Now I’m not saying, don’t create wonderful relationships, find work you love, and spend time cultivating a healthy body because it’s all in vain.  I’m saying make them a part of your structure, not your foundation. The circumstances of our lives were never meant to be used for our foundation.  People leave, jobs get eliminated, and bodies get sick and die. I’m not even being pessimistic, these are simply truths, are they not?  Once you get really clear and honest with yourself about these truths, and you stop trying to convince yourself that circumstances will stay exactly the same; then you can begin to notice and cultivate a truly solid foundation.

It is actually a gift when everything in our lives that we’ve attached our well-being to begins disappearing.  We then have the opportunity to identify the elements of our life that are truly unchanging.  Those things that endure time, space, and circumstances.

The question then becomes: what is solid enough to build our lives on?  What can weather the storm of changing circumstances?  What can absorb the shock of our bodies breaking down and the people we love physically leaving?  I can’t tell you what your answer should be, because this is a much deeper, and much more spiritual conversation.  An area where I have faith and personal experience, but I don’t have any sort of cosmic answers or expertise.  Those kinds of answers are above my pay grade.  I will, however, tell you what I want to build my life around and maybe in my sharing that, you will see something for yourself.

I am committed to building my life on a foundation of love.  For me, love is the only thing that never changes.  Love is unshakeable and all encompassing.  I believe love is our spiritual essence.  Love is who we really are.  Love is formless and ageless.   Love is a multiplier and asks nothing of anyone.

It is a simple understanding, a knowing, and a faith. When those storms come, and you know that the situations and circumstances will inevitably change, you can make peace with that.  I invite you to rest easy in the understanding that there is a deeper part of you.  This is an essential part of all of us that is untouched by the heartache, the physical pain, and the suffering that comes with life.  This is the part of us that was there when we were born, and will exist long after our physical bodies have withered and passed away. 

If you get in touch with this essence, or spirit, or unconditioned self, or god… whatever you want to call it, you will have a much gentler and more peaceful experience of life.  When you are in the middle of a terrible storm or thought or circumstance, you can always rest easy in the notion that “this too will pass”, and not only that, but there is something that won’t pass.  And that something for me is love.

Coaching Tip of the Week:

This week I want to invite you to not do anything to build a sturdier foundation for your life.  Take a week off from working on yourself, your relationships, and your life.  With that freed up energy, spend some time looking in the direction of your true nature.  Get quiet as best you can, and settle back into yourself.  Play around with remembering who you really are.  If you have a spiritual practice or a book you go to, maybe pick it up again.  If not, go to love. The more you look in the direction of love, the more you see it and experience it.  Rest easy this week in the unconditional love of the universe.  And if you are in the middle of a particularly nasty storm, you might remind yourself that even the worst storms always pass, and give way to sunny skies.

Until Next Week, Love and Light,

Coach Ty   

The Crazy Dance Of Fear

 "We are boxed in by the boundary conditions of our thinking"

-Einstein

As an ontological coach, one of the things I have been trained to do with people is to separate out the essence of who people really are from their crap(that's a technical term by the way).  Our 'crap' is basically everything we do and say that is not particularly useful to us, other people, or the planet.  Our essential self is the us that was there when we were born, that part of us that is pure love and being.  Here are a few of the names people give to this distinction: Essence vs Survival Mechanism, Spirit vs Ego, Love vs Fear,  and Unconditioned Self vs Conditioned Self... just to name a few.  Personally, I love these distinctions because their purpose is to recognize the truth of who we are, which is beautiful, peaceful, loving, creative, and joyful.  Anything not that, is just the thing we learned very early on in an attempt to escape our fears when the big scary world seemed... well, big and scary.  It's not who you really are.  Let me repeat... IT'S NOT YOU!  When people no longer identify themselves with their crap, they get to suffer less and enjoy life more. (Warning: This does not mean you no longer have to take responsibility for your actions)

However, the problem with this distinction is that the way the 'survival mechanism', and the 'ego' are often talked about can make them seem really scary, permanent, and overly complicated.  These aspects of the mind we often liken to big scary shadow figures of ourselves that just come to life randomly and take over control of our mind and body.  As coaches we even give them silly names in an attempt separate ourselves from them and create awareness.  Mine are, 'people pleasing wimp', and 'invisible wizard'.  These are wonderful and can be extremely useful, but they can actually add to the complication and seeming hopelessness of our unwanted thoughts and behaviors.

The good news is, it's not complicated at all.  The simple truth is that we as human beings think.  That's pretty straight forward, is it not?  I don't know anyone who doesn't have thoughts. And from there we create habits of thought, which are just thoughts we've had over and over again, which we call beliefs.  There's no big scary mechanism that takes over our minds.  What happens is, we think thoughts that  then appear real to us. We 'believe' these thoughts to be important and meaningful, so we invest our time and energy into them, in turn, scaring ourselves with them.  One of my very favorite analogies for this I first heard from the brilliant coach Steve Chandler, and he asks people to imagine a child who draws a scary looking picture on a piece of paper and then suddenly runs out of the room screaming because he thought it was real.  A scary movie is another wonderful metaphor.  It's only truly scary when we get caught up in it, and forget that it's just a movie.  When in reality, if you zoomed the camera out, you'd see the make-up artists, the director and stage crew, the boom microphone, and the props.  It's awfully hard to be scared when we see it for what it really is, just a movie.  Our minds are the same, we have these thoughts, and we forget they are just thoughts, and that's where the train comes off the tracks.

It's also worth keeping in mind that not all thoughts are created equal.  Our thoughts can be boiled down into essentially two categories: 'love based thoughts', and 'fear based thoughts'(To learn more read my past article Love vs. Fear).  When you are in any unpleasant emotional state, anger, sadness, guilt, regret; you can look a little deeper and you will always find fear underneath.  Conversely, all of your wonderful thoughts are based in love.

Here's where we as coaches and helping professionals sometimes make things complicated.  We focus on the content of thoughts and specific unproductive behaviors, and forget that they are simply manifestations of thought in general.  When we have fearful and insecure thoughts running through our heads and we forget that they're just thoughts, we often act on them.  This can lead to a whole lot of seemingly crazy behaviors. Some people lash out physically or verbally.  Some people hide from the world.  Some people take drugs.  Some people punish themselves. Some people eat excessively, or hardly at all.  Some people obsessively clean or create routines.  Some people take massive action.  Some people get depressed and suicidal.  All of these behaviors are simply different manifestations of the same thing... mistaking our fearful insecure thinking for being real and important.

When we observe the people who are doing that crazy stuff they do... the behavior seems insane, does it not?  We take their behaviors personally. We don't understand that everyone is just doing what they learned how to do when they feel afraid.  All we need to do is simply understand that when we are thinking fearful thoughts and we identify with those thoughts, we will feel afraid and do our own version of the crazy dance. When we know this is all that is happening, it allows us to open up to compassion for others and compassion for ourselves(To learn more read my article on It's Never Personal).  We all have a different flavor of behavior that we learned when we were young.  The problem is, we can't actually ACT our way out of fear because fear doesn't come from outside of us; it comes from our thinking... 100% of the time. And, as one of my mentors Michael Neill says, "The worst way to try and change how we feel, is to try and change the world."

The beauty of it all is that in order to move passed the fear, all it really requires is waiting and letting go.  Awareness and understanding can be useful but they are not necessary because Fear is not our natural state, love is.  Now, it might feel normal because you are in the habit of buying into your fear based thinking, but we have to actually think our way into being afraid.  When there is nothing in particular on our minds that we are caught up in, we feel a sense of peace and well-being.  Whether it's unconscious or conscious, the thought has to be there for us to feel fear.  Just play around with taking your thinking less seriously, and your life experience will shift dramatically.

To wrap up this article, I want to invite you to kick the tires with me on this metaphor.  Imagine your sense of well-being, love, peace, joy, and wisdom all came in the form of a giant colorful beach ball.  Now you might remember from physics class that when a big ball full of air is placed in the water it just floats there comfortably on the surface.  Now, from time to time, it will likely bob a little up and down with the natural ebb and flow of the tide.  As we go the way of life, a wave will inevitably hit and the ball will dip a little lower than normal. The first time this happens when we are very young and don't understand the nature of our well-being, we panic and get the crazy idea that we need to do something to get the ball back to the surface quicker.  We don't know what to do, so we look around and see the big people around us wrestling with their beach balls and struggling to push them under the water, so we simply follow suite; after all they are the big people, they must know what they are doing. We of course don't realize that they learned the same thing when they were little watching their parents.   The beauty is, the second we understand that just like the beach ball, our well-beings' natural state is to float right up to the surface, it becomes obvious that we don't need to do anything except stop wrestling with it. We don't need years of therapy to find what's already there, we simply need to see that often the only thing keeping us from our essence and our well-being is our own struggle to get back to it.

My invitation to you as you go the way of life this week is to notice the wrestling match that you've been engaged in for years, and give it up for a little while.  See what happens.  You might be pleasantly surprised when your inner peace and wisdom float right back up to the surface.  Don't get discouraged if the ball has been pushed under pretty deep, it will make it's way back up.  And as you look around and see everybody else in your life locked in this ridiculous battle royale, struggling to push their beach balls' under the surface, see if you can support just one other person this week to see the insanity for themselves. Then, perhaps, they too can easily and effortlessly let go of the reins and return to themselves.

Just in case that all zoomed right over your head, here's a brief summary:

• We do crazy stuff when we get afraid and insecure
• We get afraid and insecure when we have fearful insecure thinking, and then mistake it for being real and important.  
• The world does not create our fear, we do.
• We have either fear based thoughts, or love based thoughts, that's it.
• Understanding this allows us to generate compassion for ourselves and others.
• There's nothing you need to do to return to your essence, it is your very nature.
• Your nature is Love, peace, joy, and well-being.
• Relax, and rest easy in that.

Until next week, Love and Light,

Coach Ty