I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have to write. On one hand, it would be nice to enjoy an income from my work, but, on the other hand, it’s somewhat frightening to think of what life would be like if my livelihood depended on inspiration showing up on a regular basis every week or — perish the thought — every day. But it doesn’t, so, when inspiration decides to take a brief vacation, so do I! In fact, I’ve only published one article for the whole of last month.

But now, inspiration has returned, and it’s time to make sure that it sees the light of day. I was thinking this morning about what an incredible wuss I was was I was a boy. I remember once running out of the doctor’s office and locking myself in my mother’s car when they told me I was due for a booster shot. I wouldn’t let her back in until she promised not to let that happen to me. Pain (or the mere prospect of pain) scared the hell out of me. Telling a kid like me to “buck up” or “be a man” would not have helped: I would still have locked you out of the car. So what happened that took me from that terrified little boy to a guy who can walk barefoot over gravel?

For me, it all started with my allergies. In order to be able to breathe in the open air, I needed desensitizing shots. It was amazing that, after the first couple of weekly injections, I quickly became familiarized with the sensation and it lost its capacity to scare me. Once I was no longer afraid of it, I realized that the mild discomfort that I experienced from the needle was really not much of anything at all. I changed my mind about the experience, reinterpreted the sensation, and now, when I have to get a shot or have some blood drawn, I no longer think of it as pain, but as just a momentary discomfort. The experience was transformed by how I thought about it.

Could this transformation have happened by force from the outside: for example, being told not to be such a baby or being called a wuss or a coward? No, that sort of ‘encouragement’ would only have made things worse and driven the fear up to the level of terror or panic. Using the ‘boot camp’ approach might yield some results with some kids, but God knows what results it would have hielded for me: it would only have made things worse. Could I have benefited from some outside help or encouragement? You bet! What most likely would have worked for me as a child would have been coaching: being encouraged to change my mind about what I was experiencing.

As an adult, we gain the potential for self-coaching. We’re able to acquire the capacity to change our world by changing how we think about our world. We get to ask ourselves the critical question (that I was not yet capable of asking myself as a boy): “Is what I’m experiencing really physical, mental, emotional or spiritual pain, or is it fear? To be honest, I was just tempted to write “just fear” a second ago, but, fear is never just fear. It always has the potential to hurt and to cause unbearable panic (what we call an “emotional hijacking”). We must never underestimate the immeasurable power of fear, even while we’re creating measures to deal with it.

Here’s what I learned as an adult in midlife transition: it’s all about how you define your experiences. At around age 50, I realized that what other people thought of me was none of my business. Years before, I had spent almost an entire year shoeless — something I never got enough of as a shy, over-protected boy. The positive effects of going barefoot are only now getting some general acceptance (more and more people are running barefoot even in marathons: something I’ve been doing for over a decade), but these benefits were just icing on the cake for me. It gave me physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pleasure: something that I had lived much of my life trying to avoid. There was one issue, though: what about walking on hot surfaces, cold surfaces and gravel?

First of all, let me say that it makes no sense to do anything that would certainly cause physical harm. Blisters, frostbite and cuts are always a possibility. However, after many, many years of walking and running barefoot in all kinds of weather and on all sorts of surfaces, I have not (yet) experienced any of those things. I take care of myself, even though I wear shoes only about as often as I wear a tie. Staying aware is the key. Certainly getting acclimatized to different environments is important, but not neraly so important as your mental attitude.

I read a book by a full-time, long-term barefooter who introduced me to the idea of sensation as texture. Reinterpreting my sense of hot, cold, and sharp allowed me to set aside the fear (the same kind of fear I had of needles as a boy) and sense only what was really there: texture and, at the extremes, some discomfort. This means using my awareness to avoid letting discomfort turn to damage. I was then able to translate those lessons into the rest of my life. I have learned to discern the difference between discomfort and fear and I’ve learned to experience my life at a much deeper level than ever before and to see what I experience as it really is, rather than through a fearful lens. Should you become a full-time barefooter? Of course, I think that would be wonderful. However, you don’t have to do that to learn a very important life lesson that will serve you exceptionally well at midlife: You can change you world by changing your mind.

Reactive decisions get us into trouble. We make reactive decisions out of fear. Fear comes from a mental confusion between discomfort and disaster. Regardless of what we may face in this life  be it illness, joblessness, financial ruin, unendurable relationships, loss of loved ones, even death itself — all of it is just another texture of life. We want to use our awareness and discernment to make the wisest choices possible and avoid real harm, yet pain is unavoidable. It comes to us as an invitation to make changes and to do things differently. Or, in the guise of death, it comes to invite us into the next phase of our personal adventure.

What are the “textures” that you’re facing in your own life right now? Do you trust yourself and the love of your Higher Power that, regardless of what happens, you’ll be OK? If so, what are you afraid of? What are you doing right now that’s like locking yourself in the car to avoid a shot in the arm? What are you avoiding that a simple change of attitude could transform into a moment of grace? I know of people who get out of bed into slippers and then sit down on a chair, take off their slippers and immediately put on their shoes; only to reverse the process at night. Their feet never touch the ground. They never get to experience the texture (and the self-awareness) that comes from full-contact walking. How about you? Wanna get your feet dirty?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

I believe that is one of the great lessons that comes with the midlife transition: the gift of perspective and the recognition that it’s not ‘all about me.’ On the one hand, my fears of imaginary consequences are overblown. I can put my concerns in my back pocket and walk through situations that used to terrify me, knowing that I’ll either survive or not and, either way, it’s OK. On the other hand, the world is not responsible for living up to my expectations of it. I can be satisfied with “progress not perfection.” As I look at myself, starting to heal from several days of feeling (as my grandmother used to say) “lousy!” and look at the ongoing journey I’m engaged in post-midlife and, at the same time, consider the midlife trials that our country is going through on this, it’s official birthday, I see some parallels and some interesting take-aways.

My life (like that of those around me whom I know well) has not turned out as I had ever imagined it would. If it had, I’d be celebrating over thirty-four years of active ministry somewhere in Florida along with the 234th anniversary of the republic instead of nursing a bacterial throat infection in Rehoboth Beach, DE along with my partner of 15 years (next month) and getting ready for a dinner party and trip to see the fireworks this evening. Needless to say, there have been a lot of false starts, a lot of pain, and a lot of missteps between there and here. Yet, I’m confident that, as mundane and ordinary as my life has turned out, it’s exactly where my Higher Power wanted me to be (based on the choices that I made, for good or ill). It’s certainly not a perfect life, but it’s a pretty good one, all in all, and an excellent reminder of how “the perfect is the enemy of the good enough.” It’s a lesson I’ve needed to learn in life, and a lesson that we might all benefit from reviewing from time to time.

This country — like life itself — is going through turmoil. It’s never been any different (and will never be different) no matter how many patriotic stories we tell ourselves. There’s an exhibit currently showing at the Museum of American Art in DC of paintings by Normal Rockwell. The art critic in today’s Washington Post analyzed those works very wisely: they don’t depict our country the way it used to be so much as the way we wish it had been. We’ve never actually been “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” People are currently yelling very loudly (and sometimes violently) about “taking back” our country, without really considering what they might be taking it back to. Only an historic perspective will bring to light the political, social and economic sins that besmirched our political past, and continue to challenge our political future.

Our childhood was never the idyllic place we imagined it to be. Time scours away the experience of the pain we endured, leaving us to imagine, in most cases, that it wasn’t so bad. Yet, for nearly all of us, it was that bad. Growing pains hurt. And what we experience in the midlife transition — that ripping away of our cherished hopes and dreams to be replaced with a more realistic but sometimes starker reality — is hardly an illusion, either. Whether it’s facing an evening of social entertaining with a nasty and energy-sapping sore throat or walking through the fears and disappointments of midlife or dealing with a social and political system that falls far from any ideal, we’re always faced with the same dilemma: what to do when it hurts.

What I love most about my chosen Christian faith is the belief in the incarnation: that the God of my understanding is no deistic watchmaker who simply wound up the universe and disinterestedly set it to unwind on its own. Rather, the incarnation suggests to me that God chose from the outset to assume the for him/herself the limitations that the very act of creation imposes on reality. Faith brings with it the stark and unavoidable comprehension that God hurts. The lesson I take from this is that, as God did not shrink back from creation because it involved suffering, that neither should we.  The only way to get beyond suffering is to go through it. We can’t solve any of the problems of our personal or political life by trying to go back to an imagined earlier, more ‘serene’ time. The only way forward is . . . well . . . forward!

Neither form of escapism will work for us as individuals or as a collective: neither hiding ourselves in an angry, fearful, self-interested protectionism, nor simply whining and complaining that things aren’t going our way. Like our Creator, the challenges of each day summon us to get our hands dirty with the work of creation: becoming involved with the process of progress, and never allowing ourselves to become complacent or discouraged by our lack of perfection. When it hurts, we take our medicine, share our pain with those who care about us, and do whatever we need to do to keep moving forward. It works when we’re sick; it works when we’re in personal transition; it works as a body politic. It’s called ‘courage‘, plain and simple: nothing grand, just bucking up, trusting God, and doing the next right thing.

And . . . have a glorious 4th of July!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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Forgiveness is a skill that requires lifelong study and practice to gain any sort of proficiency at all; and yet it is the one and only skill that will infallibly determine whether we experience our existence as a triumph or a tragedy. Since the emergence of human consciousness, people have gone to incredible lengths to discover the so-called ‘secret of (a happy) life’, yet the ‘secret’ is perfectly simple and perfectly obvious to those who have the spiritual eyes to see it: forgiveness. On the surface, it seems way too simple, like the prophet Elisha telling Na’aman the Syran general to wash in the Jordan to cure his leprosy. Yet developing this one little skill plumbs the very spiritual depths of the person who we think we are.

When we feel wronged, what are our choices? In fact, we are faced with only two choices: to forgive; or to exact vengeance. The course of action you choose to pursue will tell you a great deal about yourself: your self image and your beliefs about who you are and your relationship to the world in which you live. If you take nothing else whatever away from this article, I’d like you to consider deeply this one point: forgiveness (or the lack thereof) is all about you and never about anyone else or any external situation.

When you choose to deflect the focus off what’s going on in you, you practice avoidance. This happens when you are too fearful to look inside yourself and to critique the basic belief systems you’re holding on to that make you feel victimized. You are not a victim; you never were a victim; it’s impossible for you ever to be a victim. Sadly, your deepest insecurities (and you’re not alone in this) get in the way of your seeing yourself as the invulnerable spiritual being that you really are.

At this point, I’d like to recommend that (if you haven’t already done so) you spend a year following the 365 exercises in the workbook accompanying the book, A Course in Miracles. The Course teaches many things, but, if I were to distill it down to its essence, I’d have to say that the core message of the Course lies in its understanding of the nature of forgiveness. It’s not something that you can get simply by reading about it. Head knowledge is great, but insufficient. Forgiveness is a skill that requires much practice to develop mastery.

So, let’s say you feel that you’ve been wronged. What then? Once you acknowledge that someone (or something) has hurt you, you have the option of taking your anger out on someone or something. This is what I’ll call the vengeance option. You’ve been hurt, so you want to hurt someone back. How many times have you become enraged and allowed your rage to overcome you? What’s going on with that? Your fearful ego has told you that you’ve been injured and that someone else is responsible for that. You feel the overwhelming need to set things right by “evening the score” and inflicting an equal or greater wound on the other. So long as you feel wounded and believe that the other is responsible for your misfortune, you’ll cling, if not to a desire for outright vengeance, then at least a seething resentment that we call “holding a grudge.”

All you really want to do is stop the pain, and, without a spiritual perspective, you may strike out either at another, or at yourself. Do you drink at your problems? If alcohol or drugs are your first line of defense against pain, there’s a very good chance you may be an addict. People who are not addicted to numbing behaviors do not employ them as their first line of defense/offense. In addition, these self-destructive approaches to dealing with the pain of being wounded are also inhibition deadening. They allow us to do (dysfunctional) things that we would not otherwise do if we were not under their influence. And, once the numbness has worn off, what remains is a searing pain of guilt and shame far worse than the original pain experienced from the (supposed) offense. Addictive behavior is truly self-destructive. That is something that our friend Richard must take a deep, hard look at: why has he chosen the bottle as his first response? If addiction is in play, then, until the addictive behavior has been adequately addressed and dealt with, forgiveness cannot happen. Addictive responses always hurt you.

Whether you choose to get even or to hold a grudge, refusing to forgive another locks you in a prison of your own creation with no possibility of parole. Please consider this Zen Buddhist story for the insight contained within it:

An old monk and a young monk were walking a long distance when they came to a stream. On the bank was a very beautiful young woman wearing a rich and fabulously expensive sari. The woman was weeping. “Why are you weeping?” asked the old monk.

“Because I must cross this stream to attend my favorite uncle’s funeral, but, if I do, I will ruin my best sari,” she replied.

“Here,” said the old monk, “Climb on my back and I will carry you across.” The woman did as he suggested, and the monk set her gently down on the other side. The two monks continued on in silence for a long tim.

“Father,” said the young monk, finally breaking their silence. “I need to ask you a question. How could you, with your vow of celibacy, not only speak to a woman, but even allow her to touch you and to carry her on your back?”

“My son,” said the old monk, “you have much to learn. I put her down beside the stream; you are carrying her still.”

Such, also, is the nature of vengeance. It is truly ironic, because, in your attempts to get back at the one who ‘injured’ you, it is yourself who becomes fixated on the event, very often long after the other has forgotten about it entirely. Whenever you seek to punish another, it is always yourself who is hurt the most. Withholding your forgiveness is a sin, rightly enough, but a sin against your own holiness and perfection. Truly, no one can hurt you without your permission, and, furthermore, you do that very thing to yourself whenever you choose vengeance. Look at the damage that Richard has caused to and for himself by his dysfunctional belief in the power of vengeance.

The refusal of forgiveness always stems from a mistaken belief about yourself: you believe that you have been hurt and that you are a victim. This is a false and self-destructive belief. In fact, regardless of what has happened (and regardless of what it feels like), you have not been injured. In fact, you cannot be injured! Forgiveness — that is, letting go of the pain — is simply an acknowledgement that nothing has happened. Can you wrap your mind around that fact? Spiritually, you are invulnerable! Even if you were to loose your reputation, your livlihood, your freedom, your health or even your life at the hands of another, your essence as an inviolable human being, beloved of God (however you may conceive of God), remains untouched. Your only duty, when faced with this kind of pain, is to ask yourself, “What is my lesson in all this?” Only then, rather than embracing self-destructive and self-defeating beliefs, will you be free to grow and deepen your spiritual awareness.

Which approach do you take to the pain? Which do you want to take from here on out? What do you have to do today to make that happen?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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This is the essential factor in the process of cleaning up your mess that rejects all blame and rationalization and commits you to a long-term program of increasing your self-awareness, deepening your consciousness, and changing those thought patterns that led you to choose poorly in the past. This, in fact, is where “the rubber meets the road” in terms of turning your attention away from reactive efforts to make up for the past and toward proactive effort to create a different future for yourself and those who depend on you (within our outside of your conscious awareness of them). Here’s your opportunity to get down and dirty with yourself, to unearth those dark corners of your soul where you feel most unloved and vulnerable, and commit to taking positive action to addressing those areas with spiritual courage.

When you create wreckage, it’s because you’ve applied the wrong formula to the wrong problem. Merely accepting the right answer isn’t enough. You need to correct the formula you’re using so that the next time the problem comes up, your answer is the right one the first time. This is how we learn and grow: try, fail, correct, try anew, succeed!

Facing the wreckage of our lives with insight and the courage to “change the things I can” defines this stage of apology as an essentially spiritual step. Whenever we need or want to create transformational change, we need to recognize the profoundly spiritual nature of our work. It’s a totally “inside job” that has three essential phases to it: honesty, openness, and willingness. Each phase contributes its part toward empowering us to make substantial change toward authentic growth and the realization of our human potential. This is the essential process that drives us toward the fulfillment of our God-given destiny — as individuals and as humanity.

The first phase is a commitment to honesty. That demands that you lay aside all blame and rationalization and that you embrace the person that your behavior has revealed you to be with humility. Are you fearful? Are you angry? Are you arrogant? Are you self-centered? Are you judgmental? Seeing your character defects this way in the light of your bad behavior can bring up defensiveness: “You’d be that way, too, if you’d gone through what I did!” And yet, we’re not responsible for what others have done to us; however, we are responsible for our reactions to that. We all have built-in defense mechanisms that we created to keep ourselves safe when we felt overwhelmed. However, now, those defenses are no longer serving us. They’re keeping us from connecting effectively with others and with our Higher Power. When bad behavior reveals our own dysfunction, it’s time that we accepted our condition honestly. It’s time that we admitted the weaknesses that we’ve so long tried so hard to cover up to ourselves, to our God, and to another human being. Humbly admitting the truth will, indeed, set us free from it.

Openness implies the readiness to look at the situation differently: to change our minds and get rid of old beliefs that no longer serve us. As an adolescent, I was deeply angry at my father for not being close to me. All that changed when I went through a spiritual crisis that caused me to take another look at the situation. I discovered to my surprise that, from my earliest recollection, I continually judged my father’s attempts at connecting with me as insufficient. There was nothing he could do to satisfy my childish demands. In effect, I pushed him away, then blamed him for not being emotionally present. Once I saw my truth, I was open to looking at the situation from a new perspective: forgiveness became possible, and I was then free to reinterpret our relationship. Once you’ve taken an honest inventory of yourself, you have the opportunity to see the same old hurts and injuries and woundedness you have always experienced festering there, and to give those experiences new meaning. You don’t get to choose your experiences, but you do get to decide what they mean for you. When you discover a meaning that no longer serves you, you can be open to experiencing it differently. That’s your choice.

Finally, willingness is just another name for courage. Many people read spiritual and inspirational books. Self-help is a popular genre. You can read inspired authors like Maryanne Williamson and what they say can resonate in your heart and in your head. Then, like many people, you can file what you’ve learned away like you’ve done with the plots of novels you’ve read over the years, and go on about your business creating the same kinds of messes that have entrapped you numberless times before. Willingness means giving practical answers to these questions: 1) how am I going to think and feel differently about these experiences when they come up again? 2) what practical steps will I take to avoid falling into the same reactive traps I’ve set for myself in the past? and 3) what decisions will I make now about how I will change my behavior when these things come up again?

This stage of cleaning up your mess is all about change, and everybody hates change. It’s painful, it requires both humility and courage, and it takes a lot of energy to change. Yet, change is synonymous with growth. As grew from childhood to adolescence, we experienced physical ‘growing pains;’ as adolescents growing to adulthood, we experienced mental and emotional ‘growing pains;’ now, as adults growing into spiritual maturity, our ‘growing pains’ are at a far deeper level than ever before: at the spiritual level. That’s why one of the most important shifts of consciousness we can experience at this stage of life is to see our messes not as failures, but as spiritual growth experiences. Take to heart the old saying, “No pain; no gain!” and embrace your mess (with all the pain that goes with it) as a gift and your golden opportunity to make a difference in your world — for that is precisely what it is!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Whether or not we recognize it, each of us constitutes an organic whole. We can’t somehow separate out our emotional pain from our physical being, our mental acuity, and our spiritual focus. When painful emotions overtake us, we can expect to experience physical discomfort (that ‘heartache’ again), mental dullness or confusion, and spiritual aridity. The entirety of our personhood goes into retreat from a condition we might call ‘feelings deprivation.’ Pain is big. It’s so big that it fills our inner space to the breaking point. It leaves no room for anything else. Ordinarily, we have room for many emotions at the same time: joy, excitement, anticipation, intimacy can all together share the same emotional space and still leave room for more, like anxiety or fear. Not so with pain. When it settles in, there’s no room left for any other feelings. We are joy-deprived. What can we do then?

Emotional pain, stretching our endurance to the breaking point, needs to be released. It needs to be let out and given its freedom. So long as we keep it pent up inside, it festers and begins to consume all our resources: our energy, our attention, our time. Emotional pain is corrosive. So long as it’s kept captive, it eats its host alive from the inside out. The ‘good news’ is that no powerful emotion (and this is no doubt the most powerful of all) can be sustained indefinitely. Eventually, even pain will wear itself out and go numb in time. However, while we’re waiting it out, real damage may be done to our organism. What price are we willing pay in terms of stress and in lost productivity while we wait for our feelings to subside? And what about the emotional cost? Even after the sharpness of pain and anger have subsided, they can still remain sullenly in the background, blocking out the emotions that we long to experience again, like joy, enthusiasm, and intimacy.

We can speed up the healing process. There are a number of approaches we can take, like talking openly and honestly with a close confidant or a therapist or mentor. Letting other people know who you are and what you’re going through is an essential part of the healing process. It’s at least one step beyond the limits of the playground of your own mind: a very dangerous place to spend unsupervised time, I’m afraid. And yet, merely talking about how you feel, difficult as it may be, has drawbacks. If you’ve been lying to yourself or deluding yourself about what’s been going on, you may succeed in convincing others to join you in your distorted view of the facts. After all, if you’ve convinced yourself of the truth of your illusion, how hard will it be to convince others? True, a very perceptive person who knows you intimately may call you on your ‘stuff,’ but, maybe not. There is a better way.

If you’re experiencing emotional pain and you’re not journaling, you should be. Thinking and talking employ similar regions of the brain (where that dangerous mental playground can be found). Writing engages different mental faculties and generates electrochemical changes. It’s much harder to lie on paper, where, no sooner have you set the words down, they stand as not-so-silent witnesses against you. Did you ever wonder why ancient societies (like the Babylonians and Hebrews) carved their laws on stone tablets? Once carved, those tablets stood as witnesses against the very people who carved them. That’s the magic of the written word. Once you’ve written it, you no longer own it. It becomes the exclusive property of the reader. If s/he doesn’t understand what you meant, or, for some reason misinterprets your meaning, that’s just too bad: it’s theirs to do with as they choose.

Writing creates a mystical dialog between the writer and the reader. This remains true even when the writer and reader are physically the same person but separated into two by the passage of time (no matter how short). The writer remains locked in the past, powerless to influence her/his work in any way. The reader lives in the flow of the present, deriving meaning from what s/he reads not only by absorbing whatever experience the writer has entombed in the words, but also creating new meanings by means of the interplay of the words and her/his own experience. That’s why foundational texts (like the religious Scriptures) can be read over and over again, and, each time, the reader will learn something new. Your writings not only stand as a witness to the person you were, they also generate a brand new truth every time they are read even if the original text was born in self-delusion. In time, a perceptive reader (even when the reader and the writer were the same person) will discern what is honest and true from what was illusion.

By writing from within your emotional pain, and writing out your emotional pain, you give yourself the gift not only of emotional expression, but also of objectivity. By appearing in words, the cycle of self-deception and self-perpetuation that feeds the emotional pain can be broken. You not only experience the catharsis of pouring your emotionality out in an expression that’s both perfectly safe and uniquely yours, you also give yourself the gift of being able to resonate with what you’ve written, saying at one time, “this is so true,” and at another, “I was kidding myself.” As it emerges, your pain begins to gain definition and to retreat within much more manageable boundaries. It no longer expands wildly, threatening to overwhelm you. You get to choose what aspects of it to own, and which to dismiss as irrelevant to the person you are now, as compared with the person you were when you wrote those words . . . even if the time that has passed is only a few minutes. Change never pauses to take a break. That’s why, “This, too, shall pass.” Do you want to ride out the pain? Then write out the pain! It’s as simple as that.

See, I feel better already!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown