CHAPTER TWELVE

The Third Exercise

“Everything that is really precious is right here,
in our hearts. Everything is already right here.”

From The Heart of Learning by Steven Glazer

In the months that followed, Sarah went up and down like a yo-yo. It was actually more like two steps forward and one step back. She would lose herself in her emotions and forget to Stop, and then, almost miraculously, would find herself again. But when she found herself, she would have the most amazing epiphanies and insights, which provided her with a clarity her obsessions never did. Her obsessions called, “So much to do, so little time to do it.” Of course, that’s how we all put it. But, remarkably, the more she looked at herself, the more Sarah discovered that it simply wasn’t true. The deeper she investigated her passion and how it played itself out in her day-to-day activity, the more Sarah saw that not only wasn’t there too much to do, there was more than enough time to do what she needed to do. And that what she had to do in her very small business was significantly less than she thought. The question of what she should do with her time suddenly became a real one, a painful one to Sarah. Given the huge reservoir of passion she possessed, and an equally huge reservoir of time available to her to put that passion to use, what was she going to do with it?

This question led to other questions, like: If everything seems limited, and time and energy are a lot less limited than I thought, then what about money? What about love? What about life? What’s really true?

In one of our next conversations, Sarah seemed particularly subdued. I asked her what was going on. She said, almost timidly, “I don’t know, Michael. But something is. I’m spending a lot less time working in the shop. In fact, I’m going home early more and more often and simply watching television. I think I’m addicted to Oprah. This is so embarrassing to tell you. Sometimes I don’t go in at all! I call one of the women who works for me and she opens up. I’ve given two of them keys, something I never would have done before. But it’s not as if I finally trust them to run my business without me. Somehow I don’t seem to care. This feels like resignation more than breaking free of my lifelong intense need to control everything. It feels dark, and heavy. I’ve never quite felt like this before.”

“Tell me a little more about your resignation, Sarah, if you can,” I said, hoping I could better understand what she was dealing with. “I understand that this is new territory for you in your life.”

“It is,” she replied. “I’m tired all the time. Bored and tired. All of a sudden, I have so little interest in All About Pies. The more I have been doing the exercises you gave me, the more I stop, the more I try to See Through It, the more I see how frenetic I am as I work. It disgusts me and makes me want to flee. To be honest, I’m not liking myself very much lately. And I don’t know what to do about it. I also feel afraid. I have no idea what’s going on, but somehow I’ve lost my way, and I don’t know where I’m going anymore. The thing that really scares me is that I don’t seem to care.”

“Oh, Sarah,” I responded. “While I can completely understand why it feels to you like you no longer care, this is not about not caring. This is about caring too much. I know you’re in pain but this pain is the answer to your prayers. You’re beginning to really see yourself, how your passion plays through you, how you are taken by it, the unproductive impact the way you’ve learned to express your passion has on you, first physically, on your face, the way you hold your mouth, your head, your eyes, your body, and on your feelings and the way you express them. I once heard someone say, I can’t remember who it was, ‘Work seduces us all. It takes all of our attention. It drugs us to sleep.’ As you have been stopping yourself so successfully, as you have been Seeing Through It, as you have courageously attempted to become the master of yourself—rather than doing whatever comes up like a willing servant, or even worse, a slave to your passion—you can’t help but come face-to-face with stuff that’s incredibly uncomfortable to see. Sarah, you’re waking up! And it’s inevitable that you wouldn’t like the person you’ve avoided seeing for so long. I’ve been waiting for this to happen.”

Sarah looked puzzled, so I asked, “Do you know why I would say that?”

“Not really,” she responded. “But I’m interested in what you meant.”

“Because now,” I said, “you can begin to change in earnest. You’re seeing some of your habitual patterns that don’t serve you or your business, and you’re feeling the kind of pain about them that is necessary to move you to want to change. I’m so sorry about the pain and the malaise you’re feeling but I can assure you that it’s temporary.

“Over and over we’ve talked about the fact that your business will never change until you do. If you can’t see the relationship between your behavior and the results you’re not achieving in your business, there’s nothing to change. And if you didn’t care deeply about achieving different results in your business, you wouldn’t have taken the steps that have brought you to this moment of seeing the condition of your life so much more clearly.

“Think about it like this, Sarah. You have become identified with your reaction to what you’re seeing about yourself, in the same way you became identified with your passion. Your reaction, the depression, the heaviness, the need to remove yourself from the path of the tornado, where all this is going on, your desire to stay home and watch television, is simply your way of saying ‘I don’t want to play this game anymore.’ Not the game called All About Pies, but the game called All About Sarah. ‘I don’t want to play this game anymore, because I don’t know how to play it!’ What I want you to consider, Sarah, is that no one knows how to play it. Not really. I’ve never met anyone who truly knows how to play the game called My Life. But I have met people who play it with all their heart anyway. And they’re living life with remarkable aliveness.

“The pain you’re experiencing will become a gift to you when you can create some distance from what you’re experiencing. Your ability to see yourself—get lost in unproductive passion, feel afraid that you’re too small to act, whatever it is—is one level of dis-identification. The next level is the ability to see it without becoming completely emotionally involved with it. To see yourself, dispassionately, with some objectivity, so you’re able to spend your energy on changing it, rather than emotionally obliterated by it, is the next step for you, a step I trust you’ll take as courageously as you’ve taken all of the others. And when that happens your relationship to life will be forever transformed. Building a World Class Company will become a joy rather than a burden.

“Try this mantra I created for myself, ‘Just stop, see it, don’t be it.’ It’s like holding yourself out in front of yourself, as if you were standing in the palm of your hand, watching yourself. Observe all of your feelings in the moment, all of your fears and dreads and angers and hurt, right now, out there, as you watch the you who’s standing there in the palm of your hand.

“With practice, you’ll be able to see the passion that runs through it all, in its different colors. You’ll learn how to discriminate, how to choose, how to be a master of your passion, what the mechanics are, how it all works, what happens when you do this, when you do that. The whole picture of your life will change, Sarah, just like it already has. What’s on Oprah will become boring in relation to the excitement of your own life.”

When I stopped talking, Sarah remained quiet in a way that told me that she was touched, and processing the implications of what she was experiencing. I could feel in the silence that she understood, at a deeper level, what it could mean for her to make a true commitment to play the game called All About Sarah in her pursuit of the game called All About Pies. And that All About Pain was, unfortunately, a necessary step in the process.

After several seconds, I felt free to continue. “This is all quite amazing, Sarah. As a result of doing these little exercises, Stop, and See Through It, relatively consistently, you started staying home instead of going to work. And you have never, ever done that before. And I’ll bet you, even though you’re not there to solve all the problems, check up on all of your people, say hello to your favorite customers, even though you’re home in bed watching television, for God’s sake!, your business is just fine. Is that true?”

Sarah laughed, a mixture of sadness breaking free and sudden relief. She said, “Michael, you know it is. In fact, it’s even better. That’s funny,” Sarah said, almost to herself. “How come I didn’t see that until you said it?”

“Because passion can distort our ability to see, Sarah. Until we understand how to work with our passion, we only see the emotions we’re consumed by, everything else is hidden. If we’re angry, we only see red. If we’re depressed, we only see blue. You might consider that you couldn’t see that your business doesn’t really need you anymore, Sarah, because you need to feel needed. Every technician needs to feel needed, which is why every technician builds a business around his own ability to produce results.

“But the thing is that while you’re feeling needed by your business, you’re ignoring what you really need: More life. More life than the business you’ve got can give you. More true vitality. More true spirit. More variety of vitality and spirit. You need to take care of yourself, Sarah, not care for yourself. You need to take care of yourself by feeding yourself the kind of food you need. And by ‘food’ I mean impressions, experiences, ideas, dimensions beyond the current tiny dimension of the business you own. You are and always have been much bigger than your business, Sarah. You couldn’t see that as long as you were consumed by your passion, doing it, doing it, doing it. But as this new experience takes root in you, as you begin to realize what a gift your wish to flee from the business has been, as all this begins to make sense to you, there will be new room for you to appreciate yourself, your richness, your unseen dimensions, your unrealized capacity. Your passion will fuel that if you ask it to. If you direct it to.”

“I guess I’ve been so consumed that I never really felt anything,” Sarah responded. It’s exactly the same as when I was a little girl, writing in my journal at night, I became consumed by my need to produce something other than what my passion was producing. It’s very tricky trying to explain this, Michael, but I need to try. Can we take just a few minutes more so that I can make sure I’m clear?”

“Of course, Sarah. I would love that,” I said.

Sarah went on, “There’s such a squirrelly thing about passion, the energy that moves in me and around me and through me. I’m always getting sucked into it, getting lost. Even when I’m feeling powerful, even when I’m feeling absolutely charged in a positive way, even then, I realize I’m not in charge like I thought I was. I’m simply charged. On a tear. And this Stopping thing, when I remember to actually do it, has the true power to enable me to actually see what’s going on, to actually stop, to come back to myself, to a place from which something quieter, something more balanced, something with greater authenticity can begin. I realize that the practice of Stopping, the practice of Seeing Through It, the practice of engaging with myself as an observer can, when I remember to do it, provides me with a place from which to be. And that place has little or no identification in it. I’m not reacting. I’m contained within my experience, and I contain it within me. There is something more genuine in it than any of the passions, the inflammations, the exaggerations, the helplessness and hopelessness, and whatever other feelings that take me over will ever be. I see so simply right now, Michael, what you mean when you talk so passionately about practice. It’s one day at a time, and then the next, and then the next. There is never an ending to seeing clearly. It feels good to say this to you.”

“I’m glad, Sarah. What you’ve just said tells me that we’ve completed our journey to the foothills. I think now is the perfect time to start climbing the mountain.”

Sarah’s voice revealed her surprise. “What? What do you mean ‘time to climb the mountain’?”

I couldn’t help the delighted laugh that came out of me. Her voice expressed so much of the little girl that I had grown to love in Sarah, the part of her that was so willing to show how she was really feeling in the moment. “You’re a treasure, Sarah. You’ve so alive, you’re so ready to take on the challenges in front of you, and so immediately available. That’s what’s so disarming about you. You’re obviously a mature woman, and yet you’re like a child. It’s the balance of the two in you that makes this possible. So let me tell you what I mean by ‘it’s time to start climbing.’

“Everything we’ve been doing together has been, in one respect, a test of your emotional mettle. And to put it succinctly, you’ve passed the test with flying colors! You now have enough appreciation, through your own experience, of what’s going to come up, continuously, on the emotional front, to challenge your achieving your long-term objectives, your discovering your vision, your nailing down in concrete terms what your purpose is, your sustaining the passion you have for building a World Class Company.

“I know you understand now, Sarah, that your ability to meet those challenges rests in your emotional strength, your ability to see yourself clearly in the middle of the storm, when everything seems to be going horribly, when you find yourself completely lacking in resources, when you’re suddenly confronted with the need to move higher on the face of the mountain and the weather turns ugly, with absolutely no advance warning, and the choices you make are life-and-death. How you respond to your feelings and how you manage them in those moments is everything.

“When the storm is brewing, and the winds are picking up all around you, moving to a different place in yourself is much more important than moving to a different place on the mountain.

“You’ve demonstrated to me that you see that, Sarah. I know in my heart that you’re a trustworthy climber. And as your guide, I’m honored to take you anywhere you want to go.”

Sarah didn’t speak for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know what to say, Michael. Only that I’m more ready for this than I have ever been in my life. I’m just surprised, and moved, by what you just said. I’m honored to be doing this with you. I know it’s going to take everything I’ve got. And yet I also know I’m not sure what I’ve got. And that’s the most exciting part about all this. Finally, in my life I don’t have to know and I’m going to learn what I’ve got as we move forward. I’m ready. So all I can say is, what’s next?”