First of all, congratulations on reaching the ninth and final step on your quest to transcend depression and live the life you want to live! To get here in the midst of battling your depression symptoms and your reactive mind is a great achievement, and you should pat yourself on the back for sticking with it.
Thus far, we have introduced you to powerful mindfulness skills that will help you live a vital, purposeful, meaningful life. Being squarely anchored in the present moment of life allows you to see the world as it is, not as what your reactive mind says it is. The twin anchors of acceptance and nonjudgmental detachment keep you from overidentifying with the distressing, unwanted private experiences that can be triggered in the course of daily living. When you hit a rough patch, you can just notice (and be skeptical of) the constant flow of reasons and moral judgments pouring out of your reactive mind. You can be aware of your self-story without having it dominate your perspective on things. You can then clearly see what’s working and what isn’t from the viewpoint of self-compassion rather than habitual self-criticism. This puts you in a perfect position to go back to wise mind mode, connect with what matters to you in life, and form a clear intention to live according to your values.
There is one central idea that we want you to grasp: We have never met anyone who wanted to be depressed or enjoyed feeling sad, numb, or empty inside. Depression is an awful place to be. And so the question is: How do people end up in a place they don’t want to be? Part of the answer is that depression is cunning and persistent. It plays into our basic desire to avoid emotional pain, even though doing so just makes that pain worse. Equally important, though, is that the forces that lead to depression slowly break down our resolve to do things that we know are good for us. When you battle low motivation and the feeling that you are walking through mud for days, weeks, or months on end, it is easy to see how your spirit could get broken.
Throughout this book, we have discussed a lot of different mindfulness strategies that, if used regularly, will create a meaningful, purposeful life. The question confronting you now is this: Will you hold yourself accountable to using these techniques, even while the forces of depression are trying to drag you down? Or to put it in even simpler terms, will you use your energy and persistence to conquer all that you can?
In this chapter, we share with you what might be the most important skill of all: making promises to yourself and following through on them. It’s very easy to make empty promises to yourself—most of us routinely do just that. Just think about the millions of people who every year make a New Year’s resolution that is all but gone and forgotten by the tenth of January. Learning to keep promises is vital to your success in the quest to transcend depression, particularly when those promises involve promoting your health; improving relationships that are central in your life; contributing to your community through work, education, or volunteerism; and developing growth-producing, restorative patterns of leisure and play. These are the core areas of living that ultimately determine your quality of life—and they will be the arenas in which you execute your most powerful life choices.
Making and keeping a resolution to engage in valued actions in these life domains, even when the temptation to avoid difficult emotions is present, takes courage. Be forewarned: Your reactive mind will work overtime to get you to stop and leave the field. You’ll have to stare down your demons and keep moving in the direction you want your life to go, even if you still see those demons on the sidelines.
The life you would like to live is out there waiting for you, and you can claim it. However, it won’t be handed to you on a silver platter. Life can be fickle at times, and you can engage in positive, values-based behaviors only to be cut down by factors you have no control over. But we will teach you how to be persistent and stay true to your values. You’ll have to do some difficult work to get there, work that won’t always be successful, but the rewards more than compensate for the challenges.
In this chapter, we will examine another central concept in ACT called choice. Choice is the act of persistently holding yourself accountable to a promise because that promise involves living up to your values and life vision. This is not done to get praise from others or earn a certificate of achievement from life; it is a pact between you and yourself. We will look at some mental and situational barriers that you can anticipate arising as you enter into this pact with yourself, as well as how to address and overcome them. In particular, we will teach you to deal with instances in which you break promises you have made to yourself. We’ll also show you how to convert broken promises into opportunities to grow more mature and wiser as a human.
The issue of human choice and free will has been a source of intense controversy and debate among neuroscientists. A classic research study published by Libet and others (1983) started the controversy by suggesting that unconscious brain impulses typically precede subjective reports of a freely initiated act. The implication is that the brain is preparing us to act even before we know it is, and our experience of choice is an illusion. More contemporary accounts have modified this rather extreme point of view to include the possibility that the experience of free will is part of a complex feedback loop between the brain’s motor cortex and the areas of the prefrontal cortex responsible for self-awareness (Haggard 2008). Human choice and decision making are part of an incredibly complex process, requiring multiple neural systems responsible for planning, prediction, mental rehearsal, reward salience, motivation, and moral judgment.
If, indeed, our brain is silently rehearsing options and actions, what is the basis for the options it is considering? One clear answer is the short-term versus longer-term reward value of the behavior. This process of valuation, or valuing, seems to originate in the orbital medial prefrontal cortex. Activation of this network is associated with decisions that involve delaying immediate gratification in return for much larger long-term rewards. Patients with brain damage to this area of the brain are typically unable to make this type of choice. Instead, they will impulsively choose an immediate small reward over a much greater long-term reward (Peters 2011).
We think of values as an intrinsic but longer-term source of personal reward. Thus, from a neuroscience perspective, choice is best thought of as an act of free will and free won’t. The free will part is choosing a course of action that might not produce immediate positive results but will result in personal gratification over time. The flip side, free won’t, is choosing not to engage in a strategy that is solely designed to produce immediate rewards (such as avoiding painful inner experiences), even though those rewards are palpable and tempting.
Luke’s Story
Luke, a twenty-six-year-old single man, lives by himself. He’s been chronically depressed since childhood, and as an adolescent he slipped into a pattern of meth addiction. He entered drug treatment two years ago, and although he’s had a few slips, he basically hasn’t been using drugs or alcohol since starting treatment. His depression has steadily worsened since he stopped using drugs and alcohol, though, and he admits to thoughts of suicide on an almost daily basis. He works part-time as a night janitor and frequently gets to work late because no one is there to know whether he has arrived or not. He enrolled in a local trade school to study computer repair but dropped out because he was failing. While he liked the classes and was academically and intellectually capable of doing the work, he didn’t complete required assignments.
Luke hasn’t been on a date for several years and avoids any activity that might lead to that, having convinced himself that he probably couldn’t follow through on even the simplest commitments in a relationship. Although he purchased a health club membership three months ago to get in shape, he has yet to go to the club. He has a few friends from his drug rehabilitation program, but he doesn’t get together with them often. Some of them are using drugs again, and he doesn’t want to relapse. He smokes about a pack of cigarettes a day and doesn’t exercise. He doesn’t attend church, but he is interested in Buddhism. Luke wants to follow through on things that are important to him, but so far his only success has been in staying off drugs.
Luke hasn’t followed through on many promises he’s made to himself in recent years. Consequently, his life lacks the meaning he desires. Living this kind of story line is inherently depressing because it precludes taking risks in the pursuit of vitality. Luke is so sold on his sad self-story of defeat that he has voluntarily withdrawn from the world of relationships. Luke’s life is going nowhere fast, and although he believes his depression is what keeps him from a better life, in reality the problem is his inability to make and keep his promises to himself.
In ACT, a choice is a pact you make with yourself—a promise to take a specific action in a specific situation regardless of what shows up inside your head. In all likelihood, your reactive mind will show up and make its best effort to get you to stop. Even as you read this, your reactive mind might be telling you that this approach will never work for you, that you’re too weak to pull it off, or that it will just provide you with another opportunity to fail. Your reactive mind is probably feeling fairly threatened right now, because committed action is to the reactive mind what the sunlight is to Dracula. Committed action spells the end of your reactive mind’s reign of terror and opens the door onto a new day where your wise mind can prevail. Committed action allows you to stop following rules and instead do what works in your life. So if you notice any kicking and flailing on the part of your reactive mind as you read any of this, simply thank your mind for these thoughts and come back into the present moment with us so we can get to work on banishing that vampire who’s been sucking you dry.
Making a choice is the ultimate act of free will, and free will is a distinctly human trait. Whereas we can train animals to behave in highly predictable ways, it is much more difficult to achieve that outcome with humans. This is because humans can reflect back on their behavior and relate it to such things as their values, a desired outcome, or its impact on others.
A choice means you are free of having to choose an action because of social expectations or the programming of your reactive mind. You choose because you have a vision of what you want life to be about, and this vision originates in the sanctuary of wise mind. This makes choice a very powerful tool in your campaign to reclaim your life. Choices are often the most powerful when made in murky situations in which there are lots of reasons for going in many directions. In these types of conflicted situations, it is easy to fall into a state of “analysis paralysis” if you rely on your reactive mind for guidance.
In Luke’s case, he constantly had to battle his reactive mind’s predictions of failing at anything that mattered to him. Given these constant predictions of failure, it actually seemed logical to him to back out of a promise at the last minute in order to protect himself from the pain of yet another broken promise.
The most powerful choices are rooted in and reflect your deeply held values. This is partly because values, like choices, are not creatures of logic. They just come into being.
Let’s take the example of Susan, a forty-two-year-old woman who struggled with depression on and off for years. Over time, she gained a lot of weight and got out of shape. She had always been athletic as a teenager and young adult, loved sports, and encouraged both of her teenage daughters to play soccer. She volunteered to be an assistant coach for her youngest daughter’s soccer team but began to make excuses for not showing up at practices because she was so self-conscious about her weight and lack of physical conditioning.
As a result of going through the Life Vision and Values planning exercise in chapter 12, Susan made a promise to herself to change her diet and get in shape, because she valued her health and wanted to coach her daughter’s soccer team. This value motivated her to run with her daughter and teammates during soccer practice—and she stuck to it. A few years ago, she had joined a gym to keep her husband off her back, but she didn’t keep her promise. This time around, Susan realized that the constant visual reminder of her daughter engaged in something that they both enjoy doing was what kept her on track.
Exercise: Choice Is All In
A choice is measured not by the size of the action it generates but rather by the quality of you being “all in.” Whatever you choose to do, aim to do so in full measure. This exercise (based on Hayes, Strosahl, and Wilson 1999) will show you what we mean. For this exercise, you need a piece of paper; a large, thick book; and a chair.
First, you must choose to complete this exercise, which involves jumping off a piece of paper, a book, and then a chair. Are you willing to make that promise to yourself? (If you’re physically unable to jump, simply commit to imagining yourself jumping.)
Next, stand solidly on both feet atop the piece of paper. Ready? Jump off the paper and onto the floor!
Now you’re ready for the next step: Put the book on the floor and stand on it with both feet. Then jump off the book and onto the floor!
Finally, stand on the chair with both feet, and then jump off the chair and onto the floor!
Further Exploration. What did you observe as you went through this simple exercise? You probably noticed that there is indeed a difference in the magnitude of the action needed to jump off a piece of paper, a book, and a chair. There’s a difference in height, and jumping off a chair feels like a bigger act than jumping off a piece of paper. If we asked you to jump off of your roof, you would probably choose not to, correct?
Notice something else though: The choice to jump is always the same, regardless of the height you jump from. You have to choose to bend your knees and use your muscles to propel you up and forward. That is the essence of jumping; it is all in, or it is something else (like falling forward). The difference between the paper, the book, and the chair has more to do with the size of the act and, as often occurs in the real world, the things your reactive mind chatters at you about (“Be careful—you could hurt yourself,” “This is stupid,” or “You’ve never been good at sports!”). Having heard your reactive mind’s analysis and warnings, you then choose to jump or not.
The beautiful thing about choice is that it has a mentally freeing quality that is present even when the choice involves a very small promise. Let’s consider Lisa, a single woman in her thirties, who was painfully shy but wanted to have an intimate partner. She first chose to join a book club that included men and women. Choosing to leave home where she felt safe (and lonely) and go to the book club was a choice, nothing more. She couldn’t go halfway to the book club; that would be a different choice, just as choosing to say yes rather than no to an invitation from a man at the book club to have a cup of coffee was a choice. That choice involved being willing to have any thoughts, sensations, feelings, or memories in awareness, while at the same time saying yes. Getting comfortable with this all-in quality of choice can be a huge step forward in your campaign to live the life you want to live. There’s a Zen Buddhist saying that makes this point far better than we can: “You can’t jump a crevice in two steps.”
Another key element of choice is that no matter how much choosing you have done, there is always more choosing ahead of you. You’ll never reach the end of this process. If you value being a faithful, affectionate partner, for example, you don’t finally reach a place called “faithful and affectionate”; you don’t get a certificate from the universe announcing that you have achieved this value and that you no longer have to make choices. There is always more faith and affection to act on. As long as you are alive and hold this value, choosing to act on this value is an important part of your life. And, if you can manage to hold that value, really keeping to your promise of, for example, being a faithful and affectionate partner, you will be as faithful and affectionate a partner at age eighty as you were at age thirty.
In many life endeavors, it is what you run into along the road that you choose that’s important, not whether you arrive at a specific destination. At times, when you’re very close to achieving a particular life outcome that reflects your values, such as getting a long-sought promotion or running your first 5K race after months of training, you may notice that the journey has changed you and that the goal no longer seems to be an end point at all; rather, it’s just a milepost on the path toward your values.
Because choice happens every day and is an ongoing process, you can operate comfortably with the knowledge that if you screw up, you will most certainly get to choose again. You will make mistakes, and you will choose, perhaps impulsively, to act in ways that aren’t consistent with your values. This happens to everyone; it’s the human condition. The bright side of this is that after every choice to act comes another choice to act. If you choose to act in a way that isn’t in accordance with your commitment or your values, just notice that and then turn your attention to the next choice that awaits you. If you choose to say no to a social invitation from a friend, and this turns out to be a form of self-isolation that only increases your depression, you will get a chance to remedy that error in short order. The goal is to be able to say to yourself, “Most of the time I choose to do things based in my values, and most of the time I keep the promises I make to myself.
As we mentioned before, the most meaningful choices in life will be made in the presence of a lot of mental chatter from reactive mind. If we had a magic wand that would allow us to install an on/off switch for your reactive mind, we would do so in a heartbeat. But the reality is that your reactive mind will come along for the ride and will try to get you to choose what it wants you to choose. That could involve you choosing to follow the same old rules for living that put you in a depression in the first place.
In a way, learning skills such as being in the present moment, practicing acceptance, being nonjudgmental, remaining detached, holding your self-story softly, practicing self-compassion, and staying in contact with your values allows you to maximize your freedom of choice in challenging life situations. This path involves choosing to walk the path of your values and being willing to steer clear of the influence of reactive mind while doing so. The journey to a vital life requires you to hold yourself accountable for follow-through on your promises, to be self-compassionate when you fail, and to remain resolute even when life fails to cooperate.
Throughout this book, we’ve helped you identify some of these barriers: life issues you might be avoiding; the thoughts, feelings, memories, and sensations that are scary to you; and mental tricks that your reactive mind might play on you. So, at this point, you’re quite clear about what some of the barriers will be; unfortunately, you can’t anticipate all of the barriers that your reactive mind will raise once you start to act. We’d like to help by alerting you to some hidden hazards that could surface in your journey toward a vital, purposeful life.
Unfortunately, because you’ve struggled with depression in the past, you’re prone to having feelings of low confidence, and this could keep you stuck in not making promises at all or not following through on the ones you have made. The word “confidence” hails from Latin and literally means “acting with fidelity” to yourself. When you act with confidence, you take valued actions even when you aren’t feeling confident. You aren’t sure what will happen, and your reactive mind might even be giving you negative predictions. Acting with fidelity to yourself means you stay true to your values even in the midst of uncertain thoughts and feelings. Ironically, this is the only way you can ever feel confident: by entering situations in which you’re uncertain and still acting in ways that are consistent with your beliefs. The goal isn’t to acquire the feeling of confidence; the goal is to learn to act confidently even if you don’t feel confident.
What if you were sexually abused as a child, but no one in your family ever acknowledged that someone hurt you? What if a parent or sibling did this, but no one is willing to fess up? Would you still be willing to make and keep promises to yourself that will help you transcend depression and reclaim your life, knowing that the person responsible for this outrage is still at large?
Often, a life story of victimization has a secret clause in it: you cannot be or act in a healthy way until the person responsible for what happened to you is singled out and punished. If this is a self-story you tend to buy into, it could become a major obstacle on your journey to a vital, purposeful existence. Fortunately, you have an equally powerful force at your beck and call: forgiveness. The modern meaning of this word is actually a distortion of its original meaning and suggests that to forgive someone is to let that person off the hook, so to speak. But when you consider the original meaning of the word “forgiveness,” you can instantly see that another course of action is available to you. The Latin root of the word “give” means “grace,” and the prefix “for” means “that which came before.”
Thus, the act of forgiveness can be viewed as giving yourself the grace you had before you were victimized. Forgiveness isn’t about freeing someone who hurt you from responsibility for horrible actions. That person will have to face the universe eventually, and it won’t be pretty when it happens. But that isn’t your job; that’s the universe’s job. Your job is to live your life as best you can and in a way that reflects your values.
One of the values-based promises you might make to yourself is to stop the cycle of abuse in your family by being a loving and devoted parent to your children. Why not take this stance, which is positive and points you toward your true north, instead of a stance in which you wait for justice to be served while your life spirals downward? Practicing forgiveness will allow you to take back your life and reclaim your grace!
Another way the reactive mind can trick you into breaking promises is by drawing you into a cycle of self-blame for not having used mindfulness principles earlier than you have. According to your reactive mind, it is your fault that you have let your depression go on as long at it has! You can’t rewind the videotape of your life and start again at the beginning. Your life is what it is, and you can live with it.
And you could also soften into the journey and realize that you are in the perfect spot you need to be in at this very moment in your life. Everything you have gone through, including your suffering, has prepared you to create the life you want to live, free from the tyranny of reactive mind and the depression it breeds. The forces in your life that led you to pick up this book are exactly what needed to happen for you to pick up this book. There is no such thing as a wasted life. Every moment of your existence, including the painful ones, is precious. You only get to do this once (unless you believe in reincarnation), so don’t look backward—look forward!
News flash: We are not gods! We are imperfect beings, and we make and break promises to ourselves and to others. That is inevitable. What happens next is critical. Will you use your energy and persistence to get back in the groove and fulfill your promise to yourself? Or will you get lost in self-analysis and self-criticism, and give up on the promise to yourself? We know this for certain: Reactive mind will not be your friend at such times. It will attempt to come up with some type of bogus reason for why you did what you did (or didn’t do what you should have done).
When you don’t follow through on a promise to yourself, you can be certain that reactive mind has played a big role in the outcome. You might notice thoughts like, “I just can’t do this; it’s too hard,” “I don’t have the time to do this the way I want to do it,” or “I can’t make any more commitments like this because I feel like a failure when I don’t follow through.” When this happens, your reactive mind is saying that you lack the ability to keep your promise. Indeed, there might be situations when life intervenes and you really don’t have the ability to follow through on a promise. For example, you might promise to reach out to an adult child you have been alienated from for years and who refuses to answer your e-mails, phone calls, or letters. In this case, you simply don’t have the ability to make that child behave in a more conciliatory way, in spite of your choice to continue trying.
What we are most concerned about are situations when you have the ability to keep a promise, but you simply don’t follow through. This is when reactive mind might be playing word games with you. Notice the word you ordinarily use in such circumstances: “can’t,” which literally means that you don’t have the ability to choose. While it may be true that you lack the means needed to succeed at following through on a promise, the likely cause is being tricked into not doing what you promised you would do. Reactive mind showed up and created the impression that you don’t have what it takes to follow through, usually because of the mental or physical barriers you might have to deal with.
A much more objective way to respond is to state out loud that you presently aren’t willing to follow through on your promise because of the barriers you will run into. This means that you could keep your promise (you have the ability to) but that you won’t keep it in this situation. The word “won’t” means you “will it not,” and since willingness is a voluntary action involving choice, you are actually choosing not to keep your promise.
Thus, when you find the word “can’t” showing up in your reason giving about a failed commitment, we want you to replace it with the word “won’t.” This will signal that you’ve encountered some barrier that you aren’t willing to confront and move through. This happens all the time to most of us; a new or more powerful barrier shows up that we hadn’t anticipated and it stops us in our tracks. The key here is not to get into a cycle of excuse-making but instead to reanchor the situation in the language of choice.
For example, Luke routinely promised himself that he would go to the health club and work out several days each week. But then he would sleep in, get distracted with menial household tasks, and then tell himself that it was too late in the day to work out now that he was tired. When he examined this behavior, he realized it was not a matter of not being able to work out when he was tired. Rather, he acknowledged that he was not willing to deal with feeling fatigued and to work out at the same time. This made it much harder for him to back out on a promise by claiming he didn’t have the ability to follow through. Sometimes, simply acknowledging that you are a choosing being—and at this moment your choice is what it is—leaves you with many cards to play when the next opportunity to choose rolls around.
Instead of beating yourself up for not following through and making this into yet another trigger for more depression, we want you to try another strategy. When you first make a promise to yourself, try to make another promise at the same time: Tell yourself that if you don’t follow through on the initial promise, you promise that you will choose to be self-compassionate at that exact moment. You pledge to acknowledge the personal value that you wish to live by and acknowledge that you have chosen to act in a way that is not consistent with your values.
We then want you to restate your choice to follow through on the initial promise the next time it becomes available to you in a life situation. Notice in this moment that all you are doing is holding yourself “response-able.” You aren’t blaming yourself or trying to motivate yourself with guilt; you are reminding yourself that you can control most of the choices you make (sometimes life will hit you with something unexpected that might throw you off course), and you are willing to be accountable for your actions.
The great thing about choosing is that you will most certainly get to choose again within a matter of seconds, minutes, or hours. If something is valuable enough for you to choose it at all, it’s probably still going to be valuable the next time that choice comes around. Not living up to a promise does not change the fact that it was your values that led you to make the promise in the first place!
As the old saying goes, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Although we’ve encouraged you not to mindlessly fuse with such sayings, and we don’t want you to take this saying too literally, it does offer some wisdom about embracing the moment when you fail to live up to your expectations. It acknowledges that such instances are indeed difficult and painful, but, at the same time, they allow you to learn a lot about who you are as a person. You can put this perspective into practice when you find that you’ve broken a promise to yourself by seeing this moment as an opportunity to learn something new about yourself. This, too, is part of what living a vital life is all about: taking the good, the bad, and the ugly in stride and using each life setback as an opportunity to choose actions that reflect your values and allow you to grow as a person. You don’t have to do this perfectly either; you can, and will, make mistakes. When you do, the most workable response is to get back on your feet and resume your journey. That’s where all of the life learning is—in the journey.
Luke did a lot of work on clarifying his life vision and his intention to follow it. He realized he actually had a lot of things that mattered to him in life. He wanted to get into an interesting, fulfilling line of work that would challenge him. He wanted to have a family, and he really wanted to be a devoted, caring father. He wanted intimacy in his life. He valued taking care of his personal health; that was the main reason he had stopped using drugs in the first place. The problem wasn’t that he lacked values; the problem was that he wasn’t following through on choices that would make his life more meaningful. Luke realized that buying into his self-story of perpetually failing in life had probably planted the seed for most of his failures.
Luke created a plan for a vital life by promising to engage in several seemingly small actions. The first was to go to his health club and exercise once a week. The morning of the day he planned to go to the gym, he felt lethargic; he had the thought that he should put off exercising until he felt better. Luke thanked his reactive mind for that thought, reminded himself of his promise, and went to the health club anyway. As it turned out, the exercise really helped his energy level and mood.
Luke’s next promise was to apply for admission to the trade school he had dropped out of. Despite the predictions of his reactive mind, he was accepted. He next promised to attend all of the project meetings in a course he was taking. Within the first week, he missed a project meeting. But rather than throwing in the towel, as he might have done before, he simply owned up to his broken promise as something he didn’t value and recommitted to attending all project meetings.
Before long, his instructor noticed how gifted Luke was and asked him to tutor students who were having trouble in the class. Luke noticed that he enjoyed tutoring and that he had a knack for it. He decided to apply to a local community college and work on getting a teaching certificate. In his first class, he met a woman he was instantly attracted to. His reactive mind kicked in big-time and reminded him that he would eventually disappoint her, drop out of sight, and be rejected. Luke pushed right back and made a promise to continue dating her even though he was afraid of rejection, and soon their relationship became serious.
Luke also learned to participate in social activities even if his mood wasn’t perfect, and a lot of times it wasn’t. However, he also noticed that his mood was less of a factor in his daily activities than it had been for a long time. The more Luke learned to make and keep promises, the more motivated he was to engage in other activities outside of his comfort zone. Luke was on the journey toward a vital life!
Just like with every other mindfulness skill we have introduced you to in part 2, consciously practicing the skills we share here will make it easier for you to use them when the time comes. These simple exercises will strengthen the reward-anticipating circuitry of your brain and help you follow through on your values-based choices.
Rolling Down the River
Choosing a valued course in life does not guarantee you an easy journey or freedom from setbacks that you have no control over. You must be persistent and pursue your promises—even when you feel as if life has treated you unfairly (or your reactive mind tells you that).
Here’s a brief mental exercise that will help you see this point. The best way to approach this exercise is to download the guided audio version from http://www.newharbinger.com/38457. Then then find a comfortable place to sit, and close your eyes for a few minutes. Really try to get yourself into the sensations of traveling down the river of life on an inner tube.
Imagine that you’ve been set on the river of your life and are asked to float the river to its end. You haven’t been given much instruction on how to do this; all you have is the assurance that this river will end in the ocean. Soon after you begin your trip, the river begins to meander back and forth, almost coming to a standstill at times so that you stop making progress. You begin to wonder whether the river is somehow coming to an end. It doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, it just meanders back and forth with hardly any force. It’s frustrating and you feel you have to walk in the river just to make the kind of progress you think you need to make.
A little while later, the current quickens. All of the sudden you are in very shallow rapids. You are bouncing along with the river and hitting rocks and boulders. You’re splashed in the face, and then splashed again repeatedly until you’re soaked through. The rapids go on and on, and you begin to feel tired, bruised, and disheartened. After one particularly hard jolt, your raft flips and you frantically swim over to the riverbank and begin cursing the river.
If life were fair, this river would go straight down to the ocean—no meandering, no rapids. If the function of rivers is to deliver water back to the ocean, why are there so many rocks and twists and turns? What do rocks have to do with getting water to the ocean? It isn’t fair that rivers are made the way this river is made! You decide that if this river doesn’t change its character immediately, you aren’t going to float in it.
But as you stare at the river in disgust, you notice that the water didn’t decide to go ashore and complain about its journey. It simply does what water knows how to do. It understands what the nature of a river is. How can you get to the ocean if you stand on the bank looking at the water flowing by?
Further Exploration. What went through your mind during this mental exercise? Could you relate to the outrage of being asked to float on a river like this, without any notion of what lies ahead of you? You didn’t ask for the boulders. You didn’t ask for your life to be hard like this. Even so, what choice is required if you are to get to the end of your journey? Sure, you have to get back on the river and start floating again. You have to accept that this is how rivers are. They don’t follow your reactive mind’s specifications of how a river should behave. Rivers have their own nature and you can’t change it. Your job is to reaffirm that you value floating the river of your life and that you will choose to let the river take you where it will.
The Garden of Choice
It is easy for emotionally loaded life situations to divert our intentions from being positively focused to becoming negatively charged. This guided meditation, inspired by Ajahn Brahm, allows you to see how easy it is to shift back and forth between positive and negative intentions, and how to use values to bring you back into contact with what is important.
To start with, find a comfortable place to sit, close your eyes, and take several deep cleansing breaths. Try to clear your mind of any cares and concerns of the day. Imagine that you have just moved into a residence with a large garden in the backyard. The garden has a beautiful flowering plum tree and several shrubs with blooms and flowers. There are even some tomato plants with ripe tomatoes.
But you also notice that the garden is full of weeds. You are really put off by the prospect of dealing with those weeds. Your first temptation is to just forget the garden and go inside and watch some TV. Next, you generate a long list of things you would need to do to get the garden in shape. You find yourself wondering if it wouldn’t be better to just let the garden go. It feels like there are just too many weeds in it to deal with. Then you realize that if you don’t water anywhere in the garden, the weeds will stop growing, but the plants and trees will stop growing too. Finally, you consider just sitting in the garden and allowing the plants, trees, and weeds to do what they naturally do. You smile as you realize what type of gardener you are.
Further Exploration. As you participated in this exercise, did you feel your own urge to react in a specific way? Was that urge based upon a positive value or a reflection of your desire to control something that you found unacceptable? What happened when you allowed the flowers, plants, trees, and weeds to just coexist? Did your reactive mind show up and push back? Like many choice points in life, there is not a right and wrong choice, so the important thing is to be fully aware that you are the one making the choice. You are the one who is playing in the garden.
Broken Promises as Teachers
One good way to capitalize on a broken promise is to approach it with gratitude. Because, painful though broken promises can feel, they are also opportunities to learn more about yourself—and because your life vision, shaped as it is by the values you hope to live by, is always there to be pursued. To practice gratitude in this way, you might think or say aloud, something like:
Thank you, life, for giving me the opportunity to learn to live with the money I have.
Thank you for helping me learn how to bounce back from arguments with my spouse.
Thank you for helping me to learn how important agreements with my friends are.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to recommit to promoting my health today.
I’m grateful for the opportunity to promote my ease of being today.
Thank you, life, for helping me learn how to accept failure gracefully.
Rolling with broken promises while reaffirming the choice you intend to make the next time around helps you accept your imperfections, and thus you can learn from them. It is important to remember that you learn as much about yourself in moments of failure as you do in moments of success. We often tell clients that the goal of living every day is to end it as a new person!
The road to a vital life involves choosing to make and keep promises to yourself.
Powerful choices can be made when there are conflicting urges to act in healthy or unhealthy ways.
Choice involves strengthening neural pathways responsible for choosing longer-term enrichment over short-term relief from inner pain.
Choice has an “all in” quality that isn’t defined by how big the choice is. Small choices require the same level of commitment as big choices.
Because a choice originates in your values, any failure to follow through doesn’t alter the fact that you have values. You will get to choose again soon enough!
When you make a promise to yourelf, make another promise to keep trying if you don’t follow through.
