Recently I was watching the movie Matrix Reloaded and there was a scene in which the Oracle says to Neo:
We can never see past the choices we don’t understand.
Hearing those words was like someone waking me from the deepest sleep and I thought, Wait, what was that—what was just said? I instantly paused the movie and then replayed that part of the scene. This was the underpinning of what I have been sharing with people through my meditation, yoga, and therapy practices. Our actions are all about choices—giving impetus to those that we can see clearly and searching for those we had no idea existed for us.
We can attain any goal by applying our strength of will to whatever we choose to do. Visualization, for example, is one effective way to do this. You simply visualize what your future would look like having achieved a particular goal, and keep this clear image in mind as you work to achieve the goal. Athletes do this. At the start of a race, runners visualize themselves crossing the finishing line first. This helps them focus all their energy on the task at hand—winning. Another way to do this is to set a specific intention, and then keep it at the forefront of your mind to put your will—your complete energy—behind it. But these practices do not address how we can make choices that we don’t know that we have, or deal with the choices we’ve made that we don’t understand, such as the choice to stop feeling like everything bad happens to you and you have limited or no control over your life.
When dealing with situations that provoke such deep-rooted negative emotions governing our actions, we most often don’t even consider that there is a choice. It’s like you’re traveling down an endless one-way street with no control over the speed or where you are going to stop. In such situations, you need to create a fork in the road that seems indelibly engraved within you, thereby putting yourself in a position to choose another destination and take control.
There is always a choice within our power to make. Sometimes it can seem impossible to think that there is a choice in a challenging situation. Then, there are those challenging situations (often recurring) in which we don’t even recognize that our natural reactions are detrimental to us, and that if we chose to react differently in that moment, the outcome could lead us down a whole new path of positive, happy consequences. Even when we are aware of how that familiar road does not lead us to the joy we seek, it can seem extremely difficult to come up with other choices. How much more alluring is the devil we know than the one we do not? An example might be how we retreat inside ourselves when faced with someone who is being confrontational. From the experience when we were younger of facing an angry person we learned to retreat within rather than stand our ground; the retreating became an instinctive reaction, one that we know we are making but feel unable to stop.
Of course, we will experience some trepidation when forging a new road in these situations. It’s at this crucial point that we begin to heighten our awareness by examining how we have truly felt in those particular situations. You can start by asking yourself, “Is this really what I want out of my life? If I were given a choice to do something different—to choose a more fulfilling road to travel—but it required more effort to get started, how crazy would I be not to take it?” This is how we begin to create a fork in what seemed to be a one-way road.
To create a fork, you have to do something to step out of your daily flow—your usual way of doing things—to a place where you can begin to construct a new road. You need to take a mental time-out. For example, during very intense work meetings in which a pivotal idea or solution isn’t forthcoming, someone usually calls for a break—to get coffee or just stretch one’s legs by walking around the building. This provides the time and mental space for a new perspective to come to mind. The challenge, however, in making new life choices and changes is how to step out of self-judgment or low self-worth to find that space where new perspectives can begin to flow. How do we step out of an intense situation when it’s inside us?
This book provides relatable ways to create space for your internal time-outs so that you can begin to come up with choices that lead to the joy and peace you seek in life. My background as an engineer has helped me create practical techniques that can be integrated into our busy lives. I also incorporated within the techniques a process that has probably been the most valuable thing I learned during my time in corporate America; it’s called setting SMART goals—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. I found that this simple concept can be applied to all aspects of our lives, and based on that, I’ve developed a way to create, track, and observe self-awareness goals. It makes the journey more fun and attainable.
From Electronic Engineering Department
to Psychiatric Department
It is said that every cloud has a silver lining. This was never so true as in November of 2004 when I got laid off from my electronic engineering job in the heart of Silicon Valley. Of course, generally speaking, we never see the silver lining at the time as we are all too busy looking at the dark cloud. Also, if the silver lining is not apparent at the time, then the wait for it to show itself can be very frustrating. When it does appear it might not be so obvious and can be a new direction so unexpected that it does not seem to be recognizable as the silver lining.
At the risk of sounding clichéd, getting laid off truly was the best thing that could have happened to me, and it led to a major, positive turning point in my life.
After being laid off, I was so stressed that only the years following my divorce seemed worse. I realized, however, that in order to get through this challenging time, I had to bring my stress down to a normal level—if stress should even be considered a normal part of our daily lives. I decided to take a couple of months off to decompress and reduce my stress before looking for another job. To do this, I turned to the only thing that I knew would help—working out in the gym for several grueling hours a day. This is what I had done all those years ago after my divorce as a way of physically exhausting myself, helping me to release the mental and physical tension, to the extent that I could hardly stay awake in the evenings.
I was getting lazy after the workouts and not stretching so decided to take half an hour of stretch yoga to force myself into stretching. I asked my yoga instructor to write down a set of simple yoga poses that I could do at home each morning. Then, every morning for about twenty minutes, I would play the strange yoga music that I had become quite accustomed to and do those poses. I did this five times a week.
About two weeks into this new morning routine, I became aware of a new inner calmness and decided to start practicing one of the meditation techniques that I had learned many years earlier. The technique I started with was to meditate on a candle flame. I explain this technique later in the book.
After meditating I began to notice a very different set of feelings inside me, a feeling of peace, calm, and stillness. These were all very strange to me as I had spent most of my life either studying or working and was in one degree of stress or another. I started calling these new feelings my Meditative Feeling.
I enjoyed this new state of being and found that while it seemed like my mind was moving slower, I was actually more efficient; I did not spend so much time chasing my tail or trying to tame my racing mind.
Like a good engineer I asked myself, “What now?” I noticed that I still made judgments of myself and others, still had discordant thoughts that lead to discordant feelings, that of course would take away from my Meditative Feeling. I had a burning desire to become a better human being, but how could I do it? I wanted a structure that would help me to hold onto the Meditative Feeling and then use it to help me to make permanent changes in how I saw myself and the world around me.
It was this desire to become a better human being that caused the Wisdom Insights to suddenly come to me. They rarely occurred during meditation but more commonly while I was doing something else, which meant that I had to scramble for pen and paper to write them down before I forgot the exact wording. I quickly realized that they were higher level perceptions of how to see myself and the world around me in a more enlightened way. I was to use them in conjunction with the Meditative Feeling for permanent change in myself. I collected them over many many years using them as my guidelines. Some were easier to integrate into my awareness than others but that did not matter, as I felt that I had been given guidance so I could actively strive into who I wanted to become. Being a good engineer I created a structure within which I could incorporate the meditative practice, the Wisdom Insights, and a method where I could create and track goals for myself to see the change happening. I knew that if I did not see changes happening quickly I would soon lose the motivation for change.
At the same time that I was starting my post-gym meditation practice and the Wisdom Insights had just started to occur, a sequence of events happened in my life that I could not explain within my engineering world view. Each time an event would happen I would put it down to coincidence and ignore it. Each time I ignored it something bigger would happen that I could not explain. Eventually an event so big happened that I could not ignore it and could not explain it. It was at that point I realized that I was not meant to stay in engineering. By this time I had found a place called Delphi University and had decided to start my new life direction by retraining as a RoHun transpersonal therapist. I pursued the training though to the Doctorate level and then started working with clients to help them work through their issues. The people who came to me had been in traditional therapy for some time and had found that they had made either only little progress or had gone as far as they could and hit a block. My entire world seemed very surreal, my whole life up to that point had been around physics and engineering and here I was working in an environment that was 180 degrees in the opposite direction. By all accounts I should have been struggling but I found that it all came to me effortlessly. Where had this part of me been all these years? Why hadn’t it shown up in any other ways, academic or literary? I would ask myself those questions for many years afterward, getting frustrated with not understanding why. I must confess it is only recently, after many years, I look at myself and realize that my perceptions of who I am and the world around me would not be as they are without having walked that path I had walked. Yes, I have finally made peace with why I spent most of my life walking in a direction 180 degrees to what I am doing now.
The Messages in This Book
We can make a real change in our lives. Real change is achievable. The benefit of very small goals can be seen in a week or two, slightly bigger goals perhaps a month or two, and bigger ones a bit longer. The key concept here is the Meditative Feeling. Without it, everything becomes a mind game, a battle of wills, or what you’d like to do and what your mind is used to doing. Without the Meditative Feeling as your foundation, it would be like trying to ski without the skis. Just imagine someone stands at the top of the ski slope ready to go down, making all the correct body moves with the ski poles but with no skis to slide on. They would not make much progress.
Another important message is that anyone can meditate anywhere. I have included three practices for people who do not already have a routine. One of these will resonate with you more than the other two and that is the one you should strive to do regularly. This will enable you to reacquaint yourself with your inner feeling of peace, stillness, and calmness. Once you can say to yourself, “Wow so this is what it feels like,” you can then try creating that feeling in other ways, perhaps by either taking a deep mindful breath anywhere, or by staring out of the office window at nothing in particular for a moment. My wife catches me doing this a lot, just staring out at the trees outside my window while working on my computer. She often wonders if I have drifted off to dreamland, but I am just staring without thinking, without observing, and connecting deeper to the Meditative Feeling. The important thing is not what you do to create the feeling but that you can do it as a regular practice or on demand in the spur of the moment.
Who Is This Book For?
The five considerations at the forefront of my mind while writing the book were to keep the content inspirational, accessible, practical, verifiable, and realistic. I imagined someone coming to me and saying, “I want to change, and I really mean it.”
It is with that type of person in mind that I wrote this book.
On the surface, that judgment might seem a bit harsh; after all, if people are doing something to try to change, then doesn’t that say that they really mean it? Not necessarily. I have found in my experience that generally there are three types of people. I admit that this is a big generalization, but it’ll help to prove my point.
I have met people who have been in therapy for many years and I asked them why have things not improved for them. After listening to them, I suddenly realized that they had become attached to their stories and have used them to define who they are. They just need their therapist to be a listening, nonjudgmental ear, but they are not willing to do what it’ll take to make any change.
The second group of people are ones who have had the tenacity to keep trying and in doing so have resolved many issues, but they couldn’t find that last bit of courage to face that final painful hurdle. Perhaps they might choose not to see what’s right in front of them, akin to denying seeing the elephant in the room.
Then there is a third group: people who have spent most of their adult life, over twenty years in some cases, trying to understand a particular self-destructive behavior. Within two days of finally understanding the cause of their behavior, their perceptions of themselves and the world around them change completely, their courage and tenacity finally rewarding them by giving them a brand new life. In their own words,
Nothing worked until I faced my trauma. My mind blocked it my whole life. I worked through the trenches. I got excruciatingly uncomfortable. I showed up. I did the work. I still show up. I still do the work. I am proud to say I am at peace finally. I don’t consider myself any labels, titles, or so on. I was just a human carrying too much heavy weight in my soul. Do I still feel anxious? Depressed? Angry? A little, sometimes. But it is always situational and I know the source. Never stop your growth. You are worth it. Peace is worth the fight.
I remember reading a book by Anthony de Mello called Awareness. Anthony was an Indian Jesuit priest, a psychotherapist, a spiritual teacher, writer, and public speaker. In his book he says:
Even the best psychologist will tell you, that people do not want to be cured, what they want is relief, a cure is painful.1
Again, on the surface this might seem a bit harsh; however, in my own personal experience, I can vouch for the painful aspect and that peace is worth the fight.
From my own and other’s experiences I have found that the three qualities we need to walk our healing path are: willingness, tenacity, and fortitude. I talk more about these later but wanted to take a moment to introduce them here.
I believe many people are looking to change but look for results too quickly and when they do not get them or fail to see them, they lose heart and give up. Just reflect on how our watching methods have changed from waiting for a DVD to be mailed to us, to just clicking a button on Netflix or Amazon and there instantly is our program. Another example, with Amazon, we can order something online and get it delivered to our doorstep–the same day! We are being spoiled, if we want something, we get it almost straight away. When you train for a marathon, you know it will take a year. When you go to university, you know it’ll take three years, but to be told that changing yourself can be an open-ended path, this can almost put you off before you begin. So, if there are small goals achieved along the way it becomes fun and we can see progress, which encourages us.
An important point I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to is that while the techniques in this book can be used in a self-help modality, there are symptoms where a therapist’s help is invaluable and in that case these techniques would be a great complement to a traditional therapy session.
How Important Is Self-Compassion?
Self-compassion is something that everybody needs. In this hectic life where so much is demanded from us, whether it is from within our families or our work environment, it can be a big struggle to stop ourselves from either completely emotionally shutting down or getting so overwhelmed that we become anxious, stressed, or worse. Self-compassion is vital. When we stop and take an objective look within ourselves at our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, asking why, we are subjecting ourselves to another environment that could add to an already stressful one. Using the methods described in the book to work on ourselves is giving us a very effective and incisive process to look at ourselves. If it is not handled with care (self-compassion) then you could end up being more self-critical, making your life worse than when you started on your internal healing quest. Remember, it is the balance between critically looking at oneself and just letting everything go … this middle ground is where the self-compassion come in.
I get asked how we can show ourselves self-compassion. It is easy to say take the middle ground, but how do we know when we are there? The simple answer I give is, “We show ourselves self-compassion when we dampen the self-critical voice in our heads.” Notice I said “dampen” and not “eliminate.” That was deliberate. If I told people to eliminate it, then every time that critical voice came up not only would they feel its sting but also feel like a failure for allowing it to happen. By telling ourselves that we are going to dampen it, taking the middle ground, you will see then we are allowing ourselves to sometimes succeed, sometimes fail, and sometimes to just reduce its intensity.
The Structure of This Book
You’ll find that this book is broken down into two parts. PART 1 addresses the mindfulness system broken down into three parts: Awareness, Action, Change. Each of these three parts makes up its own chapter in PART 1. Awareness of some basic concepts. Action, how to watch your thoughts, feelings, and behavior, and implementing actions discovered from your new awareness. Change, tracking your changes in a quantifiable way so that you can see yourself changing.
PART 2 of the book is connected to the “Action” step of PART 1. It is in this step we find the space that is mentioned in the sub-title of this book. Having said that, there is not one space between thoughts and actions but two. Throughout the book I assume a sequence that thoughts lead to feelings which lead to actions. From this we can see that there are two gaps. The first is between feelings and actions and the second between thoughts and feelings. Let’s talk through an example and then be able to see just how PART 2 fits into this sequence. Let’s suppose that I am repairing something around the house and after finishing it I step back and reflect on how it looks. Now in that moment of reflection I judge the work to be not good enough. That thought could lead me to feeling unhappy and dejected because I had just spent all that time for something I consider not good enough. My subsequent action could then be to just leave it promising myself to work on it another day, but knowing I never will. Potentially every time I look at it, I could feel useless and wonder why I bothered at all. In this book you will learn how to find the space between feelings and actions so that rather than just having a knee-jerk response we create a space where we can choose a more enlightened action. However, that means while our actions have become more enlightened, we still have the discordant feelings inside us.
Generally speaking, when we have feelings that are unpleasant, we either push them down or deny them, and neither of these options are good. So, how do we change our unpleasant feelings? A better question might be how do we stop them from occurring in the first place? Well, if thoughts lead to the creation of feelings then we will need to change our thoughts. Going back to our odd job around the house, let’s assume that I still have my initial thought of the work not being good enough but now I insert another thought, a less judgmental one, something along the lines of, “I did the best I could and while there is room for improvement, it has got the job done.” While this thought might not make me want to open a bottle of champagne, it will stop the creation of any discordant feelings. This idea of inserting a more enlightened thought between an initial discordant thought and the possible generation of associated unpleasant feelings is where PART 2 comes in. The Wisdom Insights in PART 2 are high level perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. When we notice that we are thinking in a non-enlightened way we can use a relevant insight to change our thought direction, thereby stopping the creation of any discordant feelings. Of course, there is more to it than just selecting a Wisdom Insight and expecting change—if it were that easy, then all the Facebook memes that get reposted should have changed the world! The insights are to be used in conjunction with the Meditative Feeling, which I cover in PART 1.
The mindfulness system described in this book is the one that I developed over many years using myself as the guinea pig and then once I had it refined, started sharing with others. I remember the excitement I felt when in my professional therapy practice I first started showing people how easy it was to meditate and to create the Meditative Feeling. Initially in the meditation group that I lead and then later in my Awareness, Action & Change workshops. Of course, this feeling was not new in the world of mindfulness and meditation, I simply brought a different focus to it. People quickly realized that one of the techniques that I shared gave them easy access to this feeling, and that they could actually meditate. It was not as esoteric or as challenging as they had heard or had experienced.
It was wonderful to see the realization appear on their faces. The best part was still to come. I would then guide them through another meditation, I call it the Life Meditation. They could relive a mildly unpleasant event from their own lives, seeing how the outcome could be favorable for all involved if they had held the Meditative Feeling during the interaction.
There it was. In thirty minutes, they had proven to themselves that they could meditate and how, by using their Meditative Feeling, they could make a change in their life. All they had to go and do now, was play with it. Yes, changing your life can be fun. The secret is to take baby steps and tackle small goals, proving to yourself that the techniques work, all the while building up one’s confidence in them.
The most important realization that came to people after doing the Life Meditation was that they had a choice in their behavior. So many people do not realize that they have a choice in how to behave, think, and feel. That was the keystone realization in their awareness. They had a choice and a method to find those choices.
In 2017 I had the opportunity to join the psychiatric department of a hospital teaching their Behavioral Health Education courses (BHE). While there was so much to learn about mainstream therapy concepts there was so much that was familiar. Many of the concepts that I had been using within my own workshops were either the same or very similar, using different words and seen from a more meditative perspective. Mindfulness was not so strongly emphasized within the BHE courses but there was latitude to insert it. So, I started to introduce many of my mindfulness concepts that were in synergy with the material being presented and found that they resonated with many people. I found that I got amazing results in a very short time period for those people that really connected with the blending of mindfulness and the material in the courses.
When I reflect back on my path, I would never have guessed that I’d go from someone who just focused on caring for and connecting with his family and circle of friends to helping complete strangers find more peace and fulfillment in their lives. While the path has not been a walk in the park in many aspects, the ability to connect and empathize with others has been effortless.
The bottom line for me is that I love who I am and would not change who I am now for the world. It has not been easy, but I really feel that I have found myself, and through this work, I hope that you find yourself, too.
1. De Mello, Anthony. Awareness. United Kingdom: Collins Fount, 1990.