UNDER CLOUD NINE – Reclaiming My Lightness of Being

Sometime during my adolescence I felt my identity as a carefree boy being challenged. Nothing extreme, just occasional negative thoughts, self doubts, perhaps a tinge of fatalism. 

ILLUSTRATION: Dreamstime

Part of it was, of course, simply being a teenager. I was experiencing feelings typical of this difficult stage: worries about fitting in, embarrassment over everything my parents did or didn’t do, frustration that I was neither a
child any more nor quite yet an adult.

But there was also something just a bit more sinister, a kind of low-grade dread. Of what, I wasn't sure. Maybe there was some dark secret my family was keeping from me.

By no means did this ruin my life; I was still generally a happy, healthy, functioning teenager. But it did have an effect, inhibiting my social life, I’m sure, and giving voice to a kind of self-defeating alter ego. I just had this vague sense that something stood between me and the full happiness I imagined was possible.

Most of the time I wasn’t even conscious of these feelings at a level I could have described, much less that I thought anyone else might notice. I just figured they were normal, that everyone felt that way.

Those hazy, dark thoughts, that elusive doubt, continued to weigh on my spirit well into my adult life.

                 Why do you always have that
                 dark cloud over your head?

DIAGNOSIS! 
When I was about 40 I had an epiphany. It occurred during a meeting of my men’s group.* That night, in our continuing effort to understand each other and challenge ourselves to grow, we were doing an exercise called simply “feedback.” **

Each of us got a handful of three-by-five cards. We were to write down for each of the other men an observation about him. No judgments, no criticisms, just an observation. We could either sign our cards or remain anonymous. 

The first card handed to me—signed by Peter, a man I admired very much for his courage and insight—read: “Jeff, why do you always have that dark cloud over your head?”

The consequences of that question have been profound. The immediate impact was a sense of relief, perhaps like that felt by a patient finally getting clarity after suffering for years with some undiagnosed illness.

Finding out that it has a name, that it’s not all in your head, at last lets you address the problem and start doing something about it.  

All this time I’d managed to keep my little affliction stuffed into an uneasy little corner of my psyche, figuring that’s just the way life is. Finally I knew that it might not be normal after all, and, more significant to me, that everyone else could see it.

 Either I’d keep entertaining this unwanted guest
 in my house, or I’d put out the “No Vacancy” sign.

CLEANING HOUSE
The very next day, finally seeing my little burden as others could see it, I began cleaning house, realizing that each time I became aware of my defeatist self talk I’d have a decision to make: either keep entertaining this unwanted guest in my house, or put out the “No Vacancy” sign.

In a sort of self-styled Zen, I started working to detach from expectation and the illusion of control. I chose to feel good, not bad. Gradually, I reclaimed my sense of completeness and rediscovered the lightness of being I’d known as a boy.

Now, lightness of being doesn’t mean one is always happy. It means that, even when all’s not going well, when you’re in pain or sorrow, you acknowledge those hurts, but don’t let them define you. You look for gratitude to supplant expectations. You take it easy on yourself and find humor in your imperfection.

A MANTRA
One thing that’s really helped is my new mantra. I guess I’ve always believed in it intuitively. But I’ve only called on it regularly since the traumatic confluence of disasters that have piled up on the world over the past decade or so. And since I’ve started encountering the many personal physical and emotional challenges of growing old.

IMAGE: Genuine Tibetan Arts

So when I find myself especially overwrought about the state of my life or of the world, that’s when I invoke it: If there’s something, anything, I can do about it right now, do it. If not, let it go.

   The things triggering them literally do not exist.

PAST, TENSE
To clear my skies of the dark cloud it’s also helped considerably to identify which tense my self talk is using to discourage me. And, if that tense is either past or future, not to listen to a word of it.

As the gifted spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle teaches, the past has already happened; it no longer exists. The future hasn’t happened; it doesn’t yet exist. The only time that does exist is the here and now.

I spend lots of time thinking about those tenses, trying to fully realize that emotions like expectation, fear, regret, dread and guilt are pretty useless considering that the things triggering them literally do not exist.

AND YOU?
So do you have a dark cloud? An inner voice that blocks out the sunshine of your spirit? We’d love to hear how you’ve come to recognize the encumbrance and how you manage it. Jot your reflection in "Comments" below.

* My men’s group, founded to challenge ourselves and each other to be more thoughtful, more loving—more evolved—human beings, has been meeting more or less every two weeks since 1977. Forty-seven years!

** We were fortunate to have two members of our group who were organizational development professionals. They provided many thoughtful team-building, consciousness-expanding and communication exercises. Among them, the “car wash,” where each week one member had to sit and be “washed” with compliments from the rest of us; a ropes course, which forced us to recognize and apply each member’s unique strengths to bring the whole group through a series of physical challenges; and taking the The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test to explore our respective personality types and how they colored our relationships with each other.

“I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.”
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

RUDE AWAKENING – Saved by Intuition

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." ALBERT EINSTEIN

To a veteran observer of Nature, seeing the invisible is no oxymoron. It happens all the time. You know something’s there because you can see or hear or smell its effects on stuff that’s around it. A branch breaks, potential prey scatters, a leaf’s folded over in just a certain way.

In those instances, there’s really no trick to it; you’re still just calling on your five basic physical senses, albeit asking a bit more of them. But there are other ways to sense, ways not so easy to explain.

      

This is new ground for most of us, a place where the physical becomes irrelevant, and where the rational and irrational begin to collide. It’s the realm of intuition and its inseparable companion, faith.

You know that feeling you get when you just sense that someone’s looking at you? Or those “little voices” that occasionally tell you to do something you weren’t even aware needed doing?

Call it what you want; dismiss it if you must. But I believe intuition is one of many credible ways of knowing. I accept it for the mysterious gift it is, one I hope to understand better, and one which already has proven quite real for me.

       She was sitting on the floor, hands 
       to her neck, fighting for every breath.

BOLT UPRIGHT
Can you really know about something even though there’s no rational way you could have known it?

Many years ago, my kids—then about five and six years old—were staying with me for the summer. Since my apartment was pretty small, I’d arranged for us to house sit the beautiful, sprawling, modern home of a couple of University of Minnesota astronomy professors while they traveled.

I took the master bedroom, while the kids—well, you know kids—they slept in bedrooms as far away from me as possible, on the lower level of what you might call the guest wing of the house.

             

I’m not a light sleeper, but one night at about 3:00 AM I suddenly sat straight up in bed and knew something wasn’t right. I listened hard for a few seconds and heard nothing. I could easily have dismissed the event as a bad dream or a quirk of being in a strange house, but the feeling was too insistent.

Still just half awake, I hurried across the living room, downstairs, past Jeff's room and right to Amanda’s room. She was sitting on the floor, hands to her neck, her face beet red. Fighting for every breath, she looked terrified.

         It’s tough to separate the whims 
         from the wants from the warnings.

Long story short: I called 911; the ambulance came; the paramedics slapped an oxygen mask on Amanda; and away we sped—lights, siren and all—to Regions Hospital. By then, her breathing was back to normal. The ER doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with her and sent us home.

We’ll never know what would have happened that night if I hadn’t felt drawn to Amanda’s room. Did my instinct and a little oxygen save her life? Or might the only consequence have been that she and I ended up with a great story to share? Either way, I’m so grateful I was able to feel that little disturbance in the universe that night and decided not to ignore it.

      

SELECTIVE LISTENING
Our little voices come to us in many forms and in many tones, from the dire warning I experienced with Amanda, to the quiet inner counsel one might hear about a new relationship, to the much-needed encouragement we sense when a risk just feels like the right thing to do.

In fact, if you’re like me so many little threads of intuition lace through your mind that it’s tough to separate the whims from the wants from the warnings. How do you know which of your little voices to heed or not heed?

I suppose, in the end, the guidance we receive from our various muses is not so different from the advice offered us by people. We learn, by experience, that some can be trusted, some we file away for future reference, and others we politely acknowledge and then wholeheartedly ignore.

HOW TO BE IN THE MOMENT – 101 Little Tips

TIP #2: Give Someone the Benefit of the Doubt.

PHOTO: Chris Owens - Flickr

Next time you sense the wagging finger of your judgment, imagine a plausible, forgivable reason for the offense. 

See, you've just extended the rest of your fingers and turned the wag to a wave—your gesture of understanding, patience, peace.

TIP #3: Give Yourself the Benefit of the Doubt.

Who are all these people whose voices we hear inside—controlling, judging, berating. Who do they think they are?

Remember, those voices are not yours. While perhaps well-intentioned, they have their own baggage. Trust your 
own voice.

HOW TO BE IN THE MOMENT – 101 Little Tips

 TIP #94

Introduce yourself to your dark side. Sign a treaty.

Know that little voice inside? Is yours your champion or your worst critic? Does it light the way for you or leave you in the dark?

Have a conversation with your alter ego. Write down the dialog as if you were a detached observer. Acknowledge the voice; try to understand whose it is; listen to what it has to say. You might just be able to win its admiration instead of its scorn...or at least meet halfway. Hey, what've you got to lose?