It's Not What Happens TO YOU That Matters...

Last night I was doing a self-development program for my church explaining a distinction when one of the participants brought up a personal issue that was causing a lot of sufferinng for them. It was a couple that could not have children. It was intense for me and I knew them and the extent of suffering that they were going through. I did the best I could in dialoging with them about that but the bottom line is this: we cannot control life to have it turn out the way we want -so if I keep resisting that I will become mentally sick. There is power in accepting that life turns out exactly the way it does. Without stories about it -it just turns out the way it does and it never turns out the way it doesn't.

So how does this help my friend? Because if we are engaged in having life turn out the way we want it to -when it doesn't there is no acceptance there. There is only resistance to what is. When we resist what is we cause stress. We also lose something: our love, zest, and passion for living. We become vulnerable to being a victim in life which takes SO MUCH of our energy.

I challenged him to live inside of an inquiry -a question. This means to accept a question and to let the question simmer on the back burner of our mind until we start to get answers. The goal is not to have the question answered but to live inside of the question and to let responses generate over and over and over again. The question is this: How is this thing, this situation that has happened to me -how is it the BEST thing to ever happen to me in my life?

All suffering is in our story. Our interpretation of events. When we take events as they are -facts, events, occurances -and separate them from our interpretation of them then we get our power back. If we were to practice separating our interpretations from what happened then we would be free from the pull of our story. Free from suffering. What is the point of suffering when things are the way they are and aren't the way they aren't? It is a pure fact. Nothing more or less than a fact. Now what can I do about it?

Life is 1% circumstances and 99% what we do about it -our response to circumstances.

Given that ratio -what can we invent, add, or create that would reinvent ourselves in a powerful way? It is in THAT question where we start to re-interpret events in a way that empowers and enlivens us.

Another friend of mine (a coach) was expressing to me how men don't want to talk about men's issues. I told him that this was his story and then we started to speculate about another story (interpretation) that would be more powerful. We concluded that men were sitting around scared and waiting for him to declare that their issue is common and "fixable" etc. Neither story is the truth. It isn't true that men don't want to talk about thie issues and it isn't true that they do. They are both interpretations and stories but one empowers and creates powerful action and the other stops any action. THAT is the point!