In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
—ALBERT CAMUS
As soon as I confronted some of my fears and began to live from a place of personal power, everything around me shifted. My life took on a very different quality. Instead of relying on other people to help and rescue me if things went wrong, I began to rely on myself.
It was a new experience. I had imagined that the people who appeared to go through life without the constraints of niggling worries and fears were extraordinarily strong and powerful. But I slowly began to see that this was wrong. If you face it bit by bit, life is not so overwhelming that it requires some kind of superhuman strength to get it right. Regular strength and courage work just fine.
You can navigate life successfully, with your eyes wide open—fully aware that we will face challenges. You don’t have to know every answer, anticipate every problem, or make sure you stay in complete control at all times. Sometimes you will fall. You’ll experience self-doubt. You’ll feel sorry for yourself. You won’t always get it right, but that’s okay. In fact, that’s how it is for everyone because we are human.
Patients sometimes come to me upset because an issue they believed they had worked through years ago has suddenly and unexpectedly resurfaced in their life. “I thought I had worked through that insecurity!” Or that problem. Or that mind-set. Or that relationship issue. The resurfacing of old challenges is not an indicator of failure, or weakness, or not having worked hard enough in therapy or in life. In fact, it is the natural order of things. Challenges will and do resurface and cycle through our lives. That’s why some therapists call psychotherapy “cyclo-therapy.” It’s not the absence of challenges that signals progress; it is being able to handle those same challenges with greater ease and fortitude. Accessing your personal power is what enables you to do that. In this chapter, we’ll explore four steps necessary to accessing your personal power: relinquishing victim mentality, cultivating faith and forgiveness, rising above indecision, and owning your thoughts and feelings.
While we sometimes feel hopeless and trapped, we all have personal power and have always had it. But some of us don’t claim it. The power to change our lives is already in our own hands. As Freud famously said, “Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are afraid of responsibility.”
Taking responsibility for one’s life is the key to soul alignment and, ultimately, fulfillment. However, rather than acknowledge our role in creating our own lives, sometimes it seems much easier to blame our problems on a difficult childhood or an unjust world. I do not at all mean to imply that a difficult childhood doesn’t present challenges to overcome or that there are not real problems in the world that truly victimize the people they afflict. Violence, genocide, war, discrimination, poverty, homelessness, hunger, domestic abuse, rape, human sex trafficking, natural disasters, and global warming are just a few of the very real and impactful human problems that require widespread change at the social and global level.
Still, it is not uncommon for some of us to relish the feeling of righteous indignation that comes from being a victim. Over time, our grip on this role can grow so tight that we come to identify with it. For example, it becomes familiar to say “this always happens to me” when faced with adversity. In a similar manner to how we can become confused thinking that our false self is actually who we are, we can become equally confused thinking that we are primarily victims of our circumstances rather than creators of our destiny.
The idea of playing the victim is as old as time. Just look at the story of Genesis. Adam said, “I didn’t do it. She told me to do it.” Eve said, “I didn’t do it. The snake told me to do it.” This is was the moment that humanity jumped onto the wheel of blame, which has been turning ever since.1 Taking on a victim mentality is one of the primary ways we as human beings give away our power to others. But who knows better what you really need other than you? When you give that power away, you’re choosing to let someone else have a say in your life even though they know less about your needs than you do.
There are certainly situations in life where it’s common to feel victimized—the death of a spouse, the loss of a job, or a natural disaster destroying one’s home. But being a victim of a calamity or even suffering a tremendous hardship are very different from adopting a victim mentality. While we frequently cannot control the life challenges and circumstances that befall us, we do have control over how we view these things and the mentality we adopt moving forward. A victim mentality keeps people stuck in a toxic, self-righteous state of pain and indignation.
On the flip side, taking accountability for how we respond to these problems and becoming involved as an agent of change in our own lives, as well as socially and globally, can be incredibly empowering. Our response is certainly a way of harnessing one’s personal power, as is relinquishing victim mentality to the degree that one’s personal circumstances allow. One recent and powerful example of this is Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai, the young woman from Pakistan who was shot for going to school and speaking out on behalf of girls’ education in her community. After months of recovery from severe bullet wounds, she turned her adversity into powerful advocacy for girls’ education around the world, raising awareness and resources as well as influencing policymakers and the media to push for change globally.
In contrast to Malala, if anyone had ideal circumstances for feeling empowered, it was Joanna, a twenty-seven-year-old college graduate living in New York City. With a hefty trust fund she inherited from her family’s oil business, she had the money to do absolutely anything she wanted yet could not summon the will to do anything.
Desperate to feel any sense of power or authority in her own life, Joanna resorted to judging others by imagining herself as being superior to everybody around her: this one didn’t dress very well; that one was not very smart; another one was unattractive or had a bad personality. But her temporary fantasies of grandiosity could not override the nagging sense of defeat, anxiety, and self-doubt that were gobbling up her life.
Kabbalah teaches of a concept called “bread of shame,” which is akin to the feeling of shame from receiving something we did not earn.2 The saying “there’s no free lunch” is never more true than when it comes to our psychology as human beings. For something to have value for us, we must work for it and earn it. For Joanna, too many things were handed to her on a silver platter without her having to lift a finger. This undermined and immobilized Joanna into a state of entitlement.
Entitlement is actually one of the most disempowering mentalities one can adopt. Feeling entitled to “the finer things in life,” for instance, makes one not appreciate those things when they are present and sorely feel their lack when they are absent. Joanna suffered from both entitlement and bread of shame, which together undermined and immobilized her, leading her to feel depressed, confused, and always looking for somebody to blame or put down.
All day long Joanna sat in her mother’s exquisitely decorated Park Avenue apartment feeling sorry for herself. She had graduated five years prior from one of the top liberal arts colleges in the nation. Rather than doing what most of her classmates did—looking for a job, taking a year off to do something different, or applying to graduate school—Joanna moved back in with her mother and never left. In the narrative she had constructed for her life, Joanna was “screwed up” because of a difficult childhood. Her mother was emotionally distant, self-absorbed, and trapped in a lifetime of victim mentality herself. Joanna’s father was equally aloof, having had numerous affairs with other women, some even younger than Joanna! In a twisted attempt at vindication, Joanna’s mother always told Joanna about her father’s affairs, which at once broke Joanna’s heart and filled her with rage—both at her father for having the affairs and at her mother for telling her about it. In Joanna’s self-constructed narrative of her life, not only had her wealthy parents taught her bad values, but she had no role models of happiness.
When her older sister, with whom Joanna was once very close, moved to India three years ago to join the Hare Krishna movement, Joanna’s grief was so extreme that she nearly became a recluse. She took her sister’s “abandoning the family” as a sign that their childhood experiences were impossible to survive; she would either have to continue to live out her miserable life or figure out her own escape plan.
In order to move forward, Joanna had to process her turbulent childhood memories. Sadness, anger, fear, and resentment poured out of her in our sessions. Joanna had built a fortress around herself with her victim mentality. Nothing could reach her behind those walls, because the one who has been wronged is invincible. No one can accuse the victims of anything. They are righteous. Untouchable. And utterly helpless.
Slowly, Joanna began to realize that the more she blamed others, the more despair and hopelessness she felt. Every time she cast herself as the victim, she denied her own power. It was a self-sustaining loop, going nowhere.
That’s why the moments of real breakthrough felt so remarkable. At those times, Joanna was able to temporarily set aside her blame and experience what was underneath it for the very first time: the deep grief she felt for the loss of her sister (with whom she no longer had contact), the anguished longing for good parents and a happy childhood. For the first time in her life, Joanna began to experience her unexpressed grief. Tears poured out of Joanna from the moment she sat down in my therapy chair to the moment she left. Day after day. Week after week. I was struck by how authentic her emotions felt now, as opposed to our early sessions where her feelings of entitlement and indignation had felt like impressions of someone else.
As heartbreaking as it was for Joanna to feel that pain, processing her pain gave her a new kind of strength. She no longer felt alone in her pain. And she’d felt the worst of it—the tears that would not stop for weeks on end. She had survived this. That was clear evidence that she was not weak, but strong; not a victim, but a survivor.
At the end of one of our emotional sessions, Joanna declared: “I’m done complaining. I’m not going to keep blaming my parents for screwing up. I want to finally start living my own life!” Joanna had made this proclamation before. Many times. But somehow, this time was different.
Change did not happen overnight. There was a period of experimentation as Joanna began to slowly step into her newfound power. It had, of course, been there all along, but it took her time to discover it and learn how to wield it.
For a long time, it felt strange for Joanna to make bold decisions on her own behalf without checking with anyone else. It was especially difficult to set boundaries with her mother.
Joanna’s family had always encouraged her to follow in their footsteps, building a life of luxury, status, and travel. But this was without any real sense of individual purpose. To live a truly fulfilled and purposeful life, one must cultivate a work ethic consistent with productivity, accomplishment, and meaning. Living with purpose is difficult without this, especially if you are burdened by bread of shame. As an important step in harnessing her personal power and relinquishing her bread of shame, last year Joanna claimed her life for herself and decided to apply to graduate school to become an architect.
Although none of us can change what happened in the past, we can be responsible for how we see ourselves in the present and what we choose to do with our lives. This recognition is an important part of relinquishing victim mentality and beginning to take responsibility for a fulfilled life.
For this stream-of-consciousness writing exercise, set your stopwatch to five minutes and write continuously on What Stops Me from Harnessing My Personal Power using the guiding questions below. As with life, let your writing take you where it may.
1. Where in my life do I see myself as a victim?
2. What would it mean to stop thinking of myself as a victim? How would I feel?
3. What would it mean to take full responsibility for all aspects of my life and not blame anybody else for anything that happens to me?
Yolanda’s story could not have been any more different from Joanna’s. Yolanda did not have a trust fund. She was everything but entitled. From the age of fourteen, she worked full-time at the McDonald’s down the street from her Harlem apartment in order to help take care of her two younger brothers after her father went to jail for selling drugs. Her mother was dependent on cocaine and her older brother was in prison for murder. She was sexually abused by her uncle when she was five years old, raped by her cousin at eleven, and got pregnant by her boyfriend at the age of fourteen.
When I was a psychiatry resident, Yolanda came to see me at the age of eighteen for anxiety. As she recounted her life story to me, I couldn’t imagine how anybody with her set of circumstances could not be anxious! Yet as I got to know her, I realized that this woman who had been to hell and back in her short lifetime had a deep and enduring sense of inner peace. I wondered where it came from.
As I got to know her, I realized that her sense of peace came from her faith. A born-again Christian since the age of sixteen, Yolanda had an amazing sense of strength about her that made her quite charismatic and immediately likable. She had a sharp wit, easy smile, and calm demeanor. She would often say, “Yeah, life is hard, but God takes care of me.” Yolanda was a deeply spiritual woman and saw evidence of God’s work in all aspects of her life. She went to church every Sunday and frequently attended Bible study classes during the week. Her faith was what allowed Yolanda to get through all the situations in her life where many people would have called her a victim. When she would become overwhelmed or anxious, she would pray to God. In fact, it was while she was praying that she “got the message” to go see a psychiatrist for help with her anxiety. For Yolanda, and many others with challenging or difficult life circumstances, maintaining a strong sense of faith and being part of a supportive spiritual community was their way of harnessing their personal power.
Yolanda and Joanna, two very different young ladies with radically different life histories, learned to harness their personal power through wholly different means. Although Yolanda is the one who many may view as a “victim” after hearing her life story, it was actually Joanna who had to relinquish victim mentality (and entitlement) in order to harness her personal power. Life circumstances had forced Yolanda to harness her personal power long ago by embracing her faith and surrendering to a Higher Power.
Yolanda’s capacity to harness her personal power through her faith is similar to that of my friend Jean-Baptiste, with whom I worked in Rwanda in 2009. Jean-Baptiste is a spiritual man who works in peace building, reconciliation, and trauma healing in Rwanda. He comes from a Tutsi family. His neighbors—a family with many children who would all come over to Jean-Baptiste’s home for dinner—were Hutus. When the Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994, the Hutus began killing the Tutsis in what felt like a situation of “kill or be killed.” Tragically, Jean-Baptiste’s neighbor, a young boy named Paul who used to come over to his home and be fed by his mother almost every day, violently and brutally killed Jean-Baptiste’s mother.
Understandably, Jean-Baptiste was horrified and enraged with Paul, who was put in jail as soon as the genocide ended. For fourteen years, Jean-Baptiste harbored pain, rage, resentment, and a desire for retribution in his heart. In the course of these fourteen years, Jean-Baptiste began to lead a national forgiveness program across the country of Rwanda, in which he inspired individuals to use the power of faith and God to find within themselves the courage, strength, and power to forgive the perpetrators of the genocide and move forward with their lives.
Fourteen years after the genocide, Jean-Baptiste went to visit Paul at the Rwandan jail. Paul thought Jean-Baptiste had come to kill him for killing his mother. Instead, Jean-Baptiste forgave Paul then and there, which Jean-Baptiste describes as the most liberating moment in his whole life. He could finally let go of all the pain and anger he had been carrying inside of him. A powerful example of harnessing one’s personal power through faith, this story signifies to me the strength of the human spirit to overcome any obstacles that enter its path. Aristotle’s words echo the wisdom of Jean-Baptiste: “Anybody can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power and that is not easy.”
As Jean-Baptiste’s incredible story shows, one of the most powerful ways of harnessing personal power is through the act of releasing anger in the service of forgiveness. Atrocity, betrayal, injustice, malice, abuse, recklessness, and slights not only cause us pain, but they hurt our pride. They feel intensely personal, and it’s hard to let them go. But if we don’t let them go, they stay stuck in the recesses of our minds and hearts for years, draining our energy without our even knowing it. My friend Jean-Baptiste is proof that in the core of our hearts, we have the power to move beyond the most difficult atrocities we have ever faced and forgive the perpetrators.
People choose to hold on to past grievances for a number of reasons. It gives them a sense of righteous indignation. They get a lot of energy from maintaining victim mentality. They feel the perpetrator does not deserve to be forgiven. These are just three of the many reasons people can hold on to grievances all the way to the grave. But the paradox is: the person who most benefits from forgiveness is not the person being forgiven. The person who will most benefit from forgiveness is you! When you are able to truly forgive somebody, you can finally let go of the anger, hurt, resentment, grudge, sadness, and vengeance that you have been carrying around in your heart, sometimes for years. As Christian theologian Lewis B. Smedes wrote, “When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.”3
Forgiveness does not mean that you were not hurt or that the act you are forgiving was acceptable. It means that you have chosen to move forward and heal yourself. From this perspective, forgiveness is a predominantly selfish act, and one in which we should engage as much as possible! Holding grudges is exhausting. You’re letting perpetrators live rent-free in your heart and mind, thereby continuing to let them hurt you. Forgiveness is simply the most energy-efficient option we have in looking out for ourselves, and the one most conducive to health, well-being, and fulfillment. It’s far from easy, and is more like an ongoing disciplined spiritual practice, like meditation, rather than an event or one-time occurrence. This is why when Jesus’s disciple Peter came to him and asked, “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me?” Jesus’s reply was “Not seven times, but seventy times seven times.” The wounds we carry, especially deep wounds, often require more than one attempt at forgiveness before we can truly release the pain we carry in our hearts and souls and be healed.
This is one of the longer exercises in the book. Please commit thirty to sixty minutes to it. Forgiveness is not something that happens overnight for most people. It often takes commitment, intention, perspective, and an expansion of the heart. This can only be achieved honestly, organically, and over time. Forgiveness cannot be forced, and efforts at forced forgiveness will only lead to confusion, repression, and denial—the counterfeits of forgiveness.
Please keep in mind that you may have experienced a transgression that you were absolutely powerless to change, and/or to which you did not contribute in any way. One such example is sexual abuse or molestation during childhood, although there are many others.
Forgiveness involves first accepting and honoring your own hurt feelings, anger, and indignation. Often, this very hurt and anger are our best teachers.
Before engaging in forgiveness, it is important to mobilize your hurt and anger in the service of yourself—to establish a sense of safety and boundaries so that the transgression does not occur again, insomuch as we can prevent it. Therefore, before we are able to forgive others, we first need to forgive ourselves for our role in what transpired, if we had any role in it at all. From this space, we are ready to begin the process.
In this exercise, we will lay down the foundation to begin the complex yet empowering process that has the potential to lighten our lives and heal our souls.
Begin this process by setting the intention to forgive somebody who has hurt you. You can set this intention, even if you are not yet ready to forgive. As author Louise Hay wrote, “We may not know how to forgive, and we may not want to forgive; but the very fact we say we are willing to forgive begins the healing practice.”
This step is optional. If you are somebody who believes in a Higher Power, asking for help from that Higher Power with this process can also be quite helpful: “Dear God, please help me find in myself the strength, courage, and compassion to forgive _____________ for _____________.”
In your journal, write why you are angry at the person you wish to forgive. Describe the boundary violation you experienced, or loss of personal safety that resulted from his or her transgression. Describe the anger, hurt, and resentment you experienced.
In your journal, identify whether you had a role in the transgression that transpired. How, if at all, did you contribute to what occurred? What part of the transgression, if any, can you take personal responsibility for? What did you learn from this experience? How will you do things differently in the future?
Now make a list of the actions you can take or commitments you can make to yourself to restore your sense of well-being, safety, and balance. What steps in self-care can you take to show yourself the support you need to begin, slowly but surely, the forgiveness process?
Forgiveness is impossible without broadening your perspective and expanding your heart. Hopefully, the above exercises have helped you expand your perspective a little. Now to expand your heart, let’s return to the exercise in chapter 6 titled “Filling Your Heart with Love” (see here).
Before you repeat this exercise, remind yourself of your intention to forgive the person you wish to forgive. As you do this meditation over time with intention, you will feel less anger and resentment toward this person. One day you may be able to release these feelings from your heart completely, at which point you will be ready to truly forgive.
If you’re truly committed to forgiving somebody, I recommend you repeat the steps above at least once a week. As your heart expands, you will become ready to finally release the anger, hurt, and resentment. Only you will know when you are finally ready to release the difficult feelings you have been carrying in your heart. If you find after you’ve tried this exercise for several weeks that you are unable to release these emotions, that’s okay. You can take a break for some time and come to back to the exercise when you feel ready.
Every important choice we make in these areas is an act of self-definition—we are what we choose. Psychologist and psychoanalyst Eric Erikson said that two of the most important areas of striving in life involve love and work. Often people come to me for therapy because they are struggling to make a choice in one or both of these areas.
In John Gardner’s novel Grendel, a wise man encapsulates the mystery of life in four inspired words: “Things fade, alternatives exclude.”4 The first profound proposition—everything fades—will be explored in chapter 12, Immortality. The second—alternatives exclude—encapsulates the meaning of this section: that every decision we make is a kind of renunciation. Choosing one thing closes the door to others. In a society with nonstop media telling us we ought to “have it all,” it has never been more difficult to deliberately cut off some of our options.
An inability to make important life choices prevents people from moving forward with their lives. Very often, people avoid making a decision out of an understandable fear of losing something. The trouble is, not making a decision is a decision, too! And, at a certain point, making a choice—any choice—is more liberating than being plagued by the relentless anxiety of indecision.
While Eduardo, a fifty-five-year-old Peruvian bartender, was working with me in therapy, he found himself facing the difficult decision of whether to leave his marriage or end his affair.
As far back as Eduardo could remember, he always had women “on the side.” Even before he was married, he had never been monogamous. If nothing else, he would hire a call girl. Over the years, Eduardo began to realize that he was not just relieving his boredom, but he had become a slave to his impulses.
If a relative slighted him at a family gathering or he experienced financial stresses in his business, Eduardo felt an immediate need to go have sex, which restored his sense of power, potency, and prowess, at least temporarily. If he ignored the urge, it became stronger until he could think of nothing else. It was no longer a simple sexual desire; it was a compulsion. Through sex, Eduardo replaced his feelings of inferiority, lack, or failure with a temporary sense of power, control, and grandiosity.
Eduardo was an expert at compartmentalizing different aspects of himself. There was Husband Eduardo, Lover Eduardo, Bartender Eduardo, Son Eduardo, Friend Eduardo, et cetera. “Husband Eduardo” and “Lover Eduardo” were virtual strangers who wouldn’t even recognize each other on the street. What one of them felt (“I love my wife”) was a matter of indifference to the other (“I can’t wait to see Beth”).
An important part of Eduardo’s healing would be to create a safe space where the different parts of Eduardo could meet, discuss their values, and combine their efforts in making choices in Eduardo’s best interest. When we did this during therapy, a very interesting thing began to happen. As we began to “decompartmentalize” Eduardo in my therapy room, he began to recognize the deep feelings of love he had for Beth, one of the women he had been seeing. It is possible that the safe space of therapy enabled Eduardo to feel loved and accepted as he was without having to put on one of his many masks. This, in turn, enabled Eduardo to love and be loved by another person, in this case Beth, in a way he never thought possible.
People don’t always have affairs to find another person. Sometimes they hope to live another version of themselves—one they don’t feel empowered to live within their marriage.
Eduardo liked the version of himself he was around Beth. He showed Beth more parts of himself than he had ever shown to another romantic partner. Beth was good at seeing and accepting Eduardo for all that he was. This soul connection was a new and exhilarating feeling for him.
But when Eduardo began seriously thinking about leaving his wife to begin a life with Beth, it filled him with more anxiety than he had ever known. The very notion of leaving his marriage filled Eduardo with incapacitating fear and guilt. Eduardo was terrified of either decision: losing his family or losing the beautiful connection he had with Beth. For one year, Eduardo floundered between two terrible choices he simply could not reconcile. It was the most stressful year of his life.
After a great deal of soul searching, Eduardo was able to rise above his own indecision and make a choice. Although he loved his intense, passionate connection with Beth, he realized his family was more important to him. He decided to walk away from the love he had found with Beth and make a commitment to improving his relationship with his wife. As he opened up to his wife in new ways, she reciprocated, and Eduardo began to discover a part of his wife he’d never known existed, a part he loved very much. By claiming his own power, he transformed his life. Instead of remaining a slave to sexual compulsion, Eduardo took responsibility for his choices and began to craft the life he wanted. As Rabbi Noah Weinberg said, “People often avoid making decisions out of fear of making a mistake. Actually the failure to make decisions is one of life’s biggest mistakes.”
Like Eduardo, Veronica found herself caught in a web of indecision. At the age of thirty-five, she came to see me with anxiety over her relationship difficulties. Always looking like she just stepped out of a glamour magazine, she was married to a rich and powerful real estate mogul who liked to drink and carouse and would, at times, lose his temper and scream uncontrollably at Veronica. She very much wanted to leave the marriage on the one hand, but at the same time she desperately wanted to have a child with this man, as she felt that her childbearing years were passing her by.
Before we started working together, Veronica had once gone to a psychic, something she told me about at our very first session. The psychic had told Veronica that one of her greatest life challenges would be to extricate herself from the role of being somebody’s “step stool” and instead step into her full power, which, as the psychic said, was akin to the energy of Queen Elizabeth. As I got to know Veronica better, I was struck by the accuracy of the psychic’s chosen metaphor illustrating Veronica’s soul correction.
My beautiful, elegant but scared patient was indeed letting herself be used as a step stool by many people in her life, including her husband. It is a role she learned as a little girl with an overly controlling mother who had such high expectations for her children that she enrolled Veronica in piano lessons at the age of two! Always having to be the “good girl” to get her demanding mother’s approval, Veronica learned to constantly walk on eggshells and let herself be stepped on or else risk her mother’s sinister wrath. Leaving her mother’s home in Georgia, she came to New York City to extricate herself from a life of proverbial servitude, only to marry a man just like her mother!
A large part of my work with Veronica involved helping her with this particular soul correction. In our sessions, I would often ask her to tap into the Queen Elizabeth part of her. I would say, “What would Queen Elizabeth do in this situation?” In response to these questions, Veronica never skipped a beat. She answered these questions with more confidence and certainty than any other questions I asked. And her answers resonated with strength and confidence (her Queen Elizabeth side) rather than fear and worry (her “step stool” side). When I would ask Veronica the same question without any reference to Queen Elizabeth, her answers came with more trepidation and uncertainty.
By tapping into Queen Elizabeth, Veronica was able to connect to her soul and get clear guidance as to how to handle any situation that came her way. When I asked Veronica one day what Queen Elizabeth would tell her to do about her marriage, she quickly and confidently answered that she should have a child with this man and then, if things did not work out, leave the marriage. By invoking the spirit of Queen Elizabeth, Veronica finally had clarity on a question she had been wavering on for many months.
One could argue that perhaps a much better outcome for Veronica would have been to leave her marriage, find a better man, and have children with him. This may very well have been an overall better outcome. Or maybe it wouldn’t. We don’t know, because that is not the decision that Veronica felt was right for her at the time. Veronica ultimately did have a child with her husband and, after three more years together, decided to leave her marriage. As we continue our work together today, we frequently invoke the spirit of Queen Elizabeth to help Veronica tap into her strength, own her power, and make sense of the difficult decisions in her life.
We discussed previously that thoughts are a very powerful form of energy. The Buddha said, “You are what you think. All that you are arises from your thoughts. With your thoughts you make your world.”
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl talks about being in the concentration camps in World War II. One of the most startling things he observed was that what people thought determined whether or not they survived. The external circumstances were the same for everybody, but the thoughts people dwelled on were quite different. Frankl watched as many prisoners became sick with malaria, while others remained healthy. Some deliberately ran into electric wires to electrocute themselves to death, while others chose to remain alive. The conditions, as we know today, were so horrific, that it would be understandable for every prisoner to suffer miserably. Yet Frankl tells us from firsthand experience that some were able to remain amazingly cheerful and positive much of the time. While in the camps, Frankl observed hundreds of fellow prisoners and came to this powerful and poignant realization:
The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. There were enough examples, often of a heroic nature, which proved that apathy could be overcome, irritability suppressed. Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.… Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him—mentally and spiritually. He may retain his human dignity even in a concentration camp.… It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful.5
This powerful recognition suggests that the real source of stress in our lives is internal, not external. Our stress is based on how we choose to see the world and respond to it. Whether we react with fear to any given situation depends on how fearful we are in the first place. For a fearful person, the world is a terrifying place. For an angry person, it is teeming with frustration. For a guilty person, sin and evil lie around every corner. Frequently, what we hold on to in our minds colors our entire world.6
Most of our lives are created by automatic thoughts to which we are completely unconscious. This is why becoming aware of the automatic thoughts that take us down the wrong roads is so important. Our conscious and unconscious minds are accustomed to working together. We learn new things—like riding a bicycle—consciously, but with practice, we can do them automatically.
We can depend on the same cooperation between our conscious and unconscious minds when we decide to change any of our unconscious tendencies, such as seeing ourselves as victims in a dangerous world. Our minds are inherently far more powerful than we realize—powerful enough to create our life experience. While it seems that our thoughts are out of our conscious control, learning to be mindful of what we are thinking is an important part of soul alignment.
Human emotions can easily be hijacked by negative thoughts. As Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, discovered in the early 1960s, streams of negative thoughts can flow through our minds whether we consciously decide to think negatively or not.7 When we make that a habit, our lives suffer. Memories of intense emotions also operate unconsciously to influence our thoughts.
When we feel something without knowing why, it is often a reaction in our unconscious mind. Feelings can be triggered faster than our mind can intercept them.8 Our perceptions race directly to the emotional center of our brains (the amygdala) without passing through the rational decision-making area. As a result, we often feel things we don’t want to feel or, sometimes, don’t even agree with! Even after we come to a new way of seeing things, old ways of thinking can pop into our minds. We can feel swept away by emotional patterns that we’ve recognized were faulty long ago. If we jump to the conclusion that we haven’t really changed, it’s because it takes time to shift things in the unconscious mind even after we’ve consciously had new insights.
In his classic book The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux, a pioneer in the study of the neuroscience of emotion, reminds us that “Evolutionary programming sets the emotional ball rolling, but from then on we are very much in the driver’s seat.”9
Most of us are not aware of what goes on in our minds and bodies when we have a thought or feeling. Mindfulness, the practice of focusing our awareness on our thoughts, emotions, and sensations, enables us to be aware of a thought, emotion, or sensation without identifying with it. Moreover, mindfulness has been shown to positively change the structure of the brain itself.10 Too often we assume that just because we feel or think something strongly, it must be true. The practice of mindfulness challenges this age-old assumption and enables us to see both thoughts and emotions as fleeting events. Thoughts are not facts. And certainly neither are emotions. Making that slight shift in perception is the first step, however small, to freeing our mind and liberating our soul. If our thoughts and feelings are mental weather patterns, mindfulness is our figurative umbrella.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer in the study of mindfulness, says that mindfulness is not a special state of mind; “it’s rather that you can bring awareness to any state you happen to be in.”11
Rather than providing a way to avoid a feeling of confusion, uncertainty, fear, or stress, the transformative power of mindfulness lies in finding a connection to whatever you’re feeling. When you are attentive to whatever is going on inside you, you are in a far better position to make good decisions in your life. This enables you to take control over your inner world rather than vice versa. Cultivating the practice of mindfulness puts you more in touch with yourself, gives you deeper insight into how you are really feeling, and enables you to come at the world from a place of greater authenticity. As Harvard-trained UCLA psychiatrist, author, and mindfulness expert Dr. Daniel Siegel explains:
Mindfulness is a form of mental activity that trains the mind to become aware of awareness itself and to pay attention to one’s own intention. As researchers have defined it, mindfulness requires paying attention to the present moment from a stance that is nonjudgmental and nonreactive. It teaches self-observation… At the heart of this process, I believe, is a form of internal “tuning in” to oneself that enables people to become “their own best friend.”12
An exploratory process like mindfulness provides relief to the mind and body by making frightening thoughts conscious, thereby neutralizing their gravity. Simply becoming aware of a feeling and describing it (“name it to tame it”) can transform it into a different form of energy. Because feelings are inherently “messy,” primitive, and intangible, putting them into language is not always easy to do. Giving language to these experiences is one way of making available the energy that we have kept locked away behind walls or cordoned off from our lives. Language is a powerful way of liberating the energy behind our emotions. This frees us to live more dynamic, fulfilling lives.
Knowing this gives us a greater incentive than ever for learning to be mindful of what we think and feel. This skill improves with practice and is well worth learning. In a recent study in the Journal of Positive Psychology, Dr. Natasha Odou and Dr. Jay Brinker found that the best ways to handle negative emotions is to write about them while holding a compassionate stance toward yourself. You achieve this stance by feeling love for yourself, forgiving yourself of any perceived wrongs, and coming from an overall place of positive self-regard. Even after only ten minutes of sustaining this stance, people in their study significantly improved their moods by learning to process their negative emotions in this way, instead of avoiding them.13
To be clear, the goal of mindfulness is not to eliminate negative emotions, but to become more aware of them, accept them as a part of who we are, and in the process, gain more control over them. Mahatma Gandhi espoused the virtues of mindfulness when he said, “I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.” Many scientific studies have shown that mindfulness decreases rumination14 and increases our control over negative emotions.15 Similar to embracing our shadow side, we would often disavow and avoid our difficult emotions rather than embrace them as a part of our authentic selves.
Scientists are now coming to understand that, in our optimal state, human beings need emotional diversity. In the Journal of Experimental Psychology, researchers reported measuring participants’ positive emotions (gratitude, amusement, awe) and negative ones (anxiety, anger, sadness). When they tested the degree of the emotions, as well as their variety and abundance (“emodiversity”), greater emodiversity was linked to less use of medication, fewer doctor visits, and decreased hospital stays, medical bills, and overall health care costs. Experiencing a full range of emotions had a positive effect on diet, exercise, and overall health as well—more so than an attempt to feel only positive emotions.16 The lesson is clear: it is important to learn to feel, tolerate, and listen to all of our emotions.
Through this exercise, you can begin to cultivate a mindfulness practice. First begin with just five minutes per day and gradually increase the duration of your practice if you can. Many experienced meditators say that they meditate an average of twenty minutes twice per day. This can be a goal of your practice, if you so choose, though even five minutes per day over time will make a noticeable difference.
This exercise is about exploring and becoming more mindful of your relationship with your thoughts. As you’ve done with some previous exercises, remove any distractions from your environment so you can fully surrender to the process. Put on comfortable clothing and go to your favorite place in your home or a beautiful place in nature. You may want to light some candles and incense, or put on some relaxing music to help create a peaceful atmosphere for yourself. Keep a journal nearby so you can write about your experiences afterward.
Read these directions completely before starting this meditation. When you are ready, sit in a comfortable position, then begin:
1. Close your eyes and take several slow deep breaths:
• Inhale through your nose for the count of two.
• Hold your breath for the count of four.
• Exhale through your nose for the count of eight.
• Repeat for five breath cycles.
2. Now, begin to breathe naturally and focus on your breath without trying to control it. As you do, thoughts will eventually begin to enter your mind.
3. When a thought enters your mind, label it. For instance, if a thought enters about what you have to do later today, you will say to yourself in your mind, “I’m having a thought about what I have to do later today.” If a thought enters your mind about what you will have for dinner tonight, label that thought accordingly. Don’t judge any of the thoughts that come to you; simply label them.
4. Now imagine a cloud floating by in front of you. As the cloud is floating by, imagine physically taking your thought out of your mind and placing it on the cloud. Then watch your thought float away.
5. Now return your attention to your normal breathing. Continue to breathe until the next thought enters your mind. Label this thought and then place it on a cloud and watch it float away.
6. Repeat this process for the next five minutes. Try to do this for five full minutes to allow yourself to experience mindfulness.
Our thoughts can be our best friends, spurring us to care about people and the world, helping us achieve goals and motivating us to rise to challenges. When we lose control of our thoughts through worry, fear, or obsession, though, they can become our worst enemies. Labeling our thoughts separates us from them and reminds us that we are not our thoughts and just because we have a thought doesn’t make it true. This is easy to forget. By placing our thoughts on a cloud and watching them float away, we recognize that we are in control of our thoughts at all times, rather than the other way around. Through this simple meditation, we can change our relationship to our thoughts over time.
After completing this exercise, begin to allow yourself to notice where your thoughts go throughout the day and make a note about what’s happening. Here are a few things to look for:
1. What do you think about when you are doing a mundane task that doesn’t take much thought, such as washing the dishes or taking out the garbage?
2. Can you notice an inner pattern or dialogue of negative thoughts that take you away from being present and in the moment? Are there specific activities, experiences, or people that trigger these patterns or inner dialogues?
3. How often in a given day do you feel anxious or worried?
4. How often in a given day did you feel happy, joyful, determined, optimistic, or empowered?
After you have gone through your day mindful of these things, take some time to write in your journal about your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with this exercise. Over time you may notice some patterns and shifts in your relationship to your thoughts and you will be able to separate yourself from them more readily.
When it comes down to it, no one can face our challenges for us. You are the only one who can carry out your soul corrections. By harnessing your personal power through relinquishing victim mentality, cultivating faith and forgiveness, rising above indecision, and owning your thoughts and feelings though practices like mindfulness, you will be able to grow stronger, take more responsibility for your life, and reveal your true potential.