Building Up My Self

I often find myself having harsh emotional reactions to situations that are less than ideal. If everything doesn't go precisely to my plan, I tend to react with some pretty predictable emotional patterns. Here are the patterns I've noticed:

• Denial - Ignoring situation altogether
• Resistance - "I don't want to."
• Rebellion - "I'm not going to."
• Self-Pity - "Why do I have to?"
• Resentment - "I shouldn't have to."
• Procrastination - Delaying engaging situation

I think I recognized a root to these patterns. I think the root here is an exultation of self. It's the core belief that I am "above" or "beyond" whatever I'm going through in one way or another. I think we all know people that have made this posture a lifestyle and they bear the effects of that posture over time. Personally, I can twist in these patterns for hours or even days before setting them down. I'd like to get to a point where I notice these thought patterns and choose not to attach to them. I truly think that's possible.

The first step, of course, is awareness. The next step is seeing that I have a choice and can choose to exult my self or humble my self to my circumstances. If I choose the latter path, I begin to see what the situation has to teach me. It also helps me to simply accept any aspects of the situation I cannot change and puts me in a mode of action to change the aspects I am in charge of. I'm not saying it's fun, but it does transmute the situation into one that is bearable and even fruitful.

Essential Connections - Will

The human will is the most precious gift ever bestowed on humanity. According to Dallas Willard in his book “Renovation of the Heart”, the purpose of our will is to be the executive center of our selves. It is intended to serve as the place where our decisions get made. He also refers to it as the heart or spirit. Think of the will as the part of you that’s in charge (on your better days at least).

One way to monitor the state of your will is to pay attention to your attitude or posture. Attitude and posture are two very closely related words that relate to how we show up in the world. When you wake up, what is the first thought in your mind? Is it one of dread, fear, or guilt? Or is it full of hope, joy, and gratitude? These thought patterns are another habit that actually can be influenced greatly by your attitude. We have the ability to focus on whatever we want to in our lives, and to interpret our experiences in any way we choose. So you can train yourself to look for the good in every situation and to pay attention to the beauty and joy that surrounds you. Yes, I know that there is also plenty of pain, evil, and struggle in this world. I’m not denying their existence. But there are also an abundance of free gifts that we all get to partake in simply because we are alive. And being grateful for the gifts you have in your life already will help you build the strength of will needed to face the dark and difficult areas of life.

What happens when our will gets misused? A major issue occurs when we attach our will to any other functional part of our selves, or worse yet, our experiences. This can happen so gradually and subtly that it’s hard to know that it’s happening until you find yourself trapped or facing a set of choices, none of which seem appealing. The example I’ll use here is attaching our will to our emotions, since I’m a bit of an expert on that one. This habit moves our emotions to the center, and drags the rest of us along with them. I don’t have to tell you that emotions are fleeting. If you’re a human, you have experienced strong emotions and mood swings. The fact that emotions are temporal and intense isn’t necessarily bad. Emotions serve a great purpose in our lives. They help bring texture and color to life. The problem comes when we put them in the driver’s seat. They tend to run us right into the nearest tree. Ouch.

How do you know if your will is strong? The best way to monitor the strength of your will is to simply pay attention to your decision making. Do you do what you say you’re going to do? This applies to what you say to others and what you say to yourself. If you follow through on your commitments, your will is strong. If not, then your will needs work. The good news is we can exercise it like any other part of our selves. How do we exercise our will? By making decisions. To practice exercising your will, take yourself off autopilot for a time and pay attention to the kinds of decisions you usually make automatically. Then you can decide consciously if you want to continue to make those decisions in that way or not. If you want to change those patterns, you can create new habits to change your “default setting”. It takes time and effort, but it IS possible to change these habits. Keep working at it, you are worth it!

Essential Connections-Thoughts and Emotions

Another functional part of yourself that it’s important to connect with on a daily basis is your mind. There are two main ways you interact with your mind, through your thoughts and emotions.

Thoughts - If you don’t monitor your thoughts, it’s easy to let them run away with you, color your experience, and define you. We don’t operate directly on the world, but on maps of reality that we create in our heads. There’s simply too much data to be aware of simultaneously, so everyone deletes major portions of their experience to cope with life mentally. The parts that you keep hold of form maps of what “reality” is like for you. There is an objective reality “out there”, but no human has ever operated in it (OK, excluding Jesus).

Do you want to know what your map of reality is like? Monitor your thoughts. Your thoughts are mirrors on the maps of reality in your head. They reveal the assumptions, paradigms, and focus areas of your mental habits. Are your thoughts filled with negativity and judgment, or positive messages and grace? If you don’t like the answer you provided to that question, you can change your mental maps.

Neuroscience has recently named a phenomenon called “neuroplasticity”, which is a fancy term for a simple reality; that is, that the mind is always changing, regardless of age. It turns out you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. All it really takes is enough energy (usually emotional, see below) and some knowledge about how the mind works to reshape the maps in your head. If you’re like most people, though, you’ll probably need the help of a professional coach or counselor (or at least a trusted friend who will call you out when they smell your B.S.) to do so.

Emotions- Thoughts and emotions are so intertwined that you can scarcely write about one without mentioning the other. There is some debate about what comes first, but either way we know that thoughts and emotions fuel each other and work together (for good or ill) in our minds. The next time you are experiencing strong emotions, notice the thoughts that are going through your head. Where are they coming from? I’m not sure exactly, but I do know that your mental habits have a direct and powerful effect on what you feel. Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying we shouldn’t feel strong emotions. Emotions are meant to be felt, so denying that they are there is unhealthy and going against how we are designed. The only unhealthy emotion is the unexpressed emotion.

We also learn from science that energy is not created or destroyed, it just changes form. So when we have unexpressed emotions, they don’t go anywhere. When we access them after being disconnected from them, we will likely feel waves of emotion that are out of balance with the current stimulus. The deeper the level of emotion, the stronger it will come out when tapped back into. But if we remain with them, allowing them to be felt and processed, pretty soon they will subside to normal levels.

Also, emotions are real but not necessarily true. When you’re feeling badly, it’s tough to see that life will ever be different from how you are experiencing in the moment. But the truth is, if we don’t latch onto and identify with our emotions, but let them flow through us naturally, they will subside on their own. The problem comes when you identify with something as transient as emotions, you put yourself on a roller coaster ride that isn’t that much fun after a while.

Like mental habits, we also have emotional habits. We have the freedom to interpret any experience in any way we wish. In other words, meaning is experience-agnostic. But as you learn to identify a certain set of stimuli to mean something, it becomes rather difficult to change what that stimuli means to you on a low level, subconscious/emotional level.

Again, these habits can be changed but in order to get the most bang for your buck, work with an expert in the field - a coach or counselor - to change the meaning of your experiences into useful drivers of positive change.

Next up: Will

Chunky!

I had a really hard day the other day. It wasn't because I had a lot of work to do. In fact, my workload wasn't that overwhelming at all. The problem was I didn't want to anything. My attitude stunk. I ended up talking with friends and procrastinating all morning long. I didn't get a thing accomplished in the morning. But the most incredible thing happened-at lunch, I prayed that God would help me reset my attitude and jump into my work in the afternoon. I was able to let go of the temper tantrum that had gripped me in the morning and actually had a very productive afternoon.

This made me think of how our days are less like a neatly arranged plate of food and more like a bowl of stew. If we're open to it, new emotions, motivations, and interpretations of our experiences will meet us in unexpected ways. But I think God enjoys showing up in the context of real life vs. in a planned church program or other compartmentalized experience. Like a bowl of stew, we may be be surprised by the chunks we eat in a day. We may dine on the spiritual equivalent of vegetables one day, and the next day chewing on chunks of meat (harder to chew, but much more nourishing). But usually, it will be both. It's up to us to really be present to taste our experience and enjoy it if possible.

I tend to want to break life apart and compartmentalize and reduce it so I can have control over it and reduce my spiritual "risk". Unfortunately, life is not compartmentalized and neatly arranged. Life is a mess. Joy, love, happiness, pain, sadness, stress - they are all thrown into the same pot for us to eat. If you feel you have complete understanding of something, it's either not living/inert, a reduction or facsimile of the truth, or you are mistaken. We can apprehend life, but we cannot comprehend it fully. To believe otherwise it to be disillusioned and set up for a painful fall as we are humbled by the Creator and put in our place as His creation.

What things do you reduce and break apart to gain control over? What fear are you dampening through this activity? What blessings are you missing by dwelling on the "chunks" of life that you don't want to "eat"?

Driving the Space Shuttle Down the Street

I hear the term "will power" thrown around quite a bit. It usually comes up when people relate their latest failure in doing something they wanted to do. "I just don't have the will power", is a common refrain. When most people refer to their "will power", I don't think they're actually referring to the power of their human will (aka spirit or heart). Our will is designed to be the place where decisions are made for the rest of our selves. It's supposed to be in charge. But most of us don't navigate life by our will; instead, we navigate by emotions, thoughts, or by our bodily urges.

The problem with going through life this way is that our will ends up at the end of the line, pulled around by the other parts of ourselves instead of leading them. These other components have a fleeting, unpredictable nature. This means that whenever we're navigating life by one of them instead of our will, we will of course be on a roller coaster in our lives instead of walking on a wide plateau of stability.

I must confess that I have spent much of my life navigating life by my emotions. In fact, I recently realized that I have identified with my emotional state for much of my life. In other words, I have equated my emotional state to who I am as a person. This put incredible pressure on myself to monitor and manage my emotions. If I was feeling less than ideal, I would do all I could to stamp out that emotional state or change it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this meant that I was often short-changing myself in my emotional life by not allowing my emotions to be present or to allowing them to be processed naturally.
I now realize (through a painful process of self-discovery) that I am not my emotions. Rather, my emotions come and go, but they don't affect my true self, or heart (spirit/will).

We often complain that we don't enough power to change the things we want to in our lives. The simile that I sprang to mind around this idea was this: navigating life by our emotions (or any other component) instead of our will is like trying to drive the space shuttle down the street and then complaining that we can't navigate it properly. The space shuttle is not designed to drive down the street, it's designed to go into space. Likewise, the human will is actually designed with power to do things beyond our wildest dreams. But we relegate it to tasks it wasn't designed for, and put it out of order. The result is frustration and failure. But putting our will in the center and navigating by it is like lighting those boosters - it unleashes a level of power so immense that it will carry us right beyond our barriers into the stratosphere of our lives, where anything is possible and there's nothing holding us back.