Do you often find yourself saying “It isn’t fair” or thinking you have more than your share of suffering?

Do you play the story of “what happened to you” over and over in your mind like a hamster running in his wheel?

Consider the possibility that there IS something you can do about that.The place to start is by distinguishing between unavoidable suffering which is a necessary part of life and the kind of suffering we create for ourselves.

“Necessary suffering” seems like a strange concept to most people. But, consider the fact that no one gets to escape some form of pain in response to the trials and tribulations of life.

• You fall and skin your knee – ouch!
• A friend lets you down or disappoints you in some significant way – sadness.
• Someone you love and treasure dies – deep grief.

A certain amount of suffering comes with the territory of being alive. If we are lucky, we learn to use these experiences as steppingstones to greater wisdom and understanding. They also have a way of getting us to draw closer to one another. We instinctively comfort one another in ways that are deeper and less common than we find in everyday life.

The unnecessary kind of suffering, according to psycho-spiritual teacher, Robert Augustus Masters, is a direct result of the stories we tell ourselves about our painful experiences. Some people obsess about their suffering. Their tales of woe become a constant irritant, like a stone in your shoe that you don’t realize you can remove.

Portia was a client of mine. I don’t think she ever made it through a session without needing to recite the litany of trials and tribulations she had faced in her life. Suffering had become her central identity. She didn’t know herself without her suffering. She kept it alive in the present by talking about it all the time like a broken record. When I attempted to show her what she was doing and invited her into the process of releasing her attachment to suffering, she left. She interpreted that as my not being supportive enough of her.

We cause ourselves to suffer more than we need to. Our distress is intensified by focusing our attention on feeling and reliving the pain again and again.

Ironically, we minimize our suffering by facing it, entering into the pain that comes our way, and moving through it.

A great example of necessary and unnecessary pain can be seen in the contrast between two ways a woman might experience giving birth. One woman actively works with her breath to move through the pain of her labor. Another is busy resisting her pain and screaming about how much it hurts.

The path through our pain is to accept its presence rather than to resist it by trying to get away from it.

Ironically, we create unnecessary pain by the very act of resisting pain. In other words, through resistance, we focus upon our pain, draw it to ourselves, and attach ourselves to it.

Our point of view – our attitude toward suffering makes all the difference in terms of how much we suffer.

In a TED Talk, BJ Miller referred to perspective as “that kind of alchemy we humans get to play with, turning anguish into a flower.”

So, next time you start throwing a pity party for yourself, change your point of view so you can change your experience. Try one of these methods:

1. Expand your perspective to entertain the good news that is coming with the bad. In other words, appreciate the half full part of the glass you are only seeing as half empty. My friend, Barbara Sarah, founded the Oncology Support Program at HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley in Kingston, NY. She shared with me a list that one of her students in a Constructive Living program made. It was a growing list identifying all the people who she was grateful to for helping her care for her hospitalized husband. 105 people and counting! As the list grew, so did her gratitude to these people. The list included such people as:

• the person who supplies the “lollipop” mouth moisturizers
• the pre-admission secretary who greets you and sets up your test schedule
• a gardener who cares for all the plants in the public areas
• the staff who buzz you in the surgical ICU

When we are encountering life’s challenges, it is important to acknowledge that our glass is not only half empty. It is simultaneously half full. So make a list of all the things in your life that are also true blessings while you are suffering. See if you don’t find yourself becoming so grateful that you forget a bit about your pain. This is about finding and restoring balance inside yourself.

2. Give yourself a deadline to finish your pity party. Give yourself 5-10 minutes or three hours to really get into all your complaints and suffering. Exaggerate the immensity of your pain and feel really sorry for yourself until the timer goes off. Then, choose to shift your focus onto doing something really thoughtful or supportive for yourself or someone else. Don’t allow yourself to start grabbing onto your pain again. If it hurts, breathe into it and keep going. Ask yourself, “Is there anything constructive I need to do about my pain?” If the answer is “yes” then do that, if it is “no” then make the choice to place your focus elsewhere.

3. Pray for your highest good. Prayer, in its highest form, is about trust and laying down your burdens. It is a surrendering to that which is beyond our comprehension. This kind of prayer is beyond personal preferences or judgments of what “should” or “shouldn’t” be happening. It acknowledges that there are forces present in our lives that are beyond our understanding. By praying for the highest good, we appeal to the benevolence of whatever forces are at work in our lives. We surrender our burdens to these forces. In other words, we acknowledge that what will happen is beyond our control. We accept that and go on about our business of living the best we can.

4. Decide to make fabulous lemonade out of your lemons. My spiritual teacher, John-Roger always advised using everything for our upliftment, learning, and growth. That advise has served me very well in the hardest of times. This is a matter of choice. We have the option of shifting the message we send ourselves about our suffering from “poor me, this is terrible” to “I wonder how I can work with this to lift myself up, to learn, and to grow.”

The bottom line is we have far more power over the degree of our suffering than most of us imagine. When we stop accentuating the negative, we make more room for better options to be the focus of our attention.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Did you know that your brain gives preference to visual information?

Researchers L.D. Rosenblum, Harold Stolovitch, and Erica Keeps refer to our senses as learning portals. They offer the following statistics regarding the percentage of data processed by each of our five senses:

Sight (both through our eyes and unconscious visual perception) accounts for an estimated 83% of the information we process.  Another 11.0% comes through hearing, 3.5% through smell, 1.5% through touch, and the remaining 1.0% through taste.

Why is this significant?

By design, our eyes focus our attention outward. The fact that the vast majority of our sensory data is visual therefore predisposes us to an external frame of reference that focuses on the physical world.

Unaware that we are “seeing” the projection of an internally-filtered reality, we misinterpret our perceptions of reality to be reality itself. Consider the heated arguments between individuals of opposing political points of view. Each sees a different reality and believes that they are “right” and those on the other side of the aisle are “wrong.”

Until we become aware of how our internal data processing determines the reality we perceive, we think we are reacting to an external reality, rather than determining what that reality appears to be.

For most of us, our socialization includes indoctrination into a binary model of consciousness. In other words, we are taught to sort people and experiences into right/wrong, good/bad, beautiful/ugly, desirable/undesirable and so on. In fact, life is far more complex and messy than that.

Learned biases and preferences short-circuit the process of developing curiosity about those differences that we are taught to reject. There is a built-in bias against diversity in this way of encountering unfamiliar people and experiences. Therefore, diversity requires a new way of perceiving beyond our autopilot right/wrong sorting process.

In a binary approach, there are only two choices. That means if we encounter someone who is different, we can’t both be “right” or “OK.” As a result, we develop very narrow tolerances for differences, rather than nurturing our curiosity and openness to all kinds of people and experiences.

Would you like to know the best way to tame your inclination to judge anyone who is different than you or any experience you don’t like? It’s to become really curious and to call upon your inner detective. When we are quick to judge, we shut ourselves down. We also close ourselves off from additional information available to us. Our myopic view blinds us from alternative ways of seeing ourselves, the other person, and the situation itself.

When we become curious, we open ourselves up and draw ourselves closer to those we don’t understand rather than shutting them out or pushing them away.

 By about the age of five or six, we have the foundation of our self-image in place and we begin to unconsciously protect, conceal, or improve our image of ourselves and to become competitive with the self-images of others. We spend most of our time focused outward through our self-image as we negotiate and navigate our way through the world and relate to the imagined self-images being projected by others.

We learn to live in a world that is a collective figment of our imaginations in which we attempt to defend and elevate our status relative to that of others.

We selectively see things that support our existing beliefs and filter out things that do not agree with our way of seeing things.

Another paradox of our visual orientation is that it makes it very difficult for us to verify and trust the existence of non-physical reality. This is the territory of self-knowledge, intuition, and spiritual awareness.

It is interesting to note that when physical things come into being we refer to them as being born. When we refer to entering or increasing spiritual awareness, we call it awakening. We become aware of something that already exists. In physical form, we exist as separate beings. Spiritually, we exist within oneness. It is our mind and emotions that have separated us.

Paying attention to non-physical reality is a bit like being a salmon swimming upstream against the current. It requires an intentional redirection of our focus. To turn inward, we must engage in a more intimate relationship with ourselves. To awaken ourselves spiritually require a different state of mind.

The external orientation of our attention, coupled with the bombardment of unconscious sensory data, makes it extremely difficult to awaken our spiritual awareness. It requires a different state of consciousness to comprehend that we are at once one and the same. We are both singular and separate.

Learning how to become more conscious of our own unique data sorting process is essential to mastering the art of being who we authentically are.

Spiritual awakening involves consciously and intentionally developing our ability to override our usual way of being and perceiving. It requires looking within rather than being drawn to an external focus by the dominance of visual sensory input we are receiving. It means cultivating a non-judgmental perspective towards differences and an awareness of a level upon which we are all the same.

This requires cultivation of a childlike curiosity rather than a defensive and competitive stance regarding our perceptions versus those of others. It requires an entirely different kind of awareness — not based on sensory data. Rather it is a matter of attunement to something greater than our physical form that is shared by all. Language and empirical science fail us in speaking clearly about such matters, but do not negate their existence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein concluded in his monumental book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This German, philosophical heavyweight is reputed to have put down is pen and become a gardener after writing that.

Each of us has our own unique life to lead.  As we learn about the power of the Reticular Activating System (RAS) it becomes clear that the quality of our consciousness determines how we experience our lives.

Ghandi said, “My life is my message.”  What does your life say about you? How skilled are you at being an active co-creator of your life?

In case you missed it, here is the link to Part 1 of this blog post.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.

Every second, we are bombarded with information.

What Do We Perceive?

In his book, Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson quantifies the processing capabilities of the human brain.

While the conscious mind processes 40 bits of information per second, the unconscious mind processes 11 million!

The fact that most of our data processing is unconscious is a great kindness in human design!

How does anyone process so much information? It’s a wonder we don’t blow our own minds! How we sort and store this massive amount of information is one of the greatest wonders of the world.

Don’t be fooled. It is easy to falsely assume that a conscious perception is more impactful than an unconscious one. In fact, being unconscious does not make a perception any less potent in impacting our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. When something is unconscious, it means we have no awareness of it. And, if we have no awareness, we can’t do anything about it.

This is why it is so important to intentionally excavate your unconscious mind when you are out of balance in your life. Self-observation is a great place to start. Pay attention to your beliefs, fears, doubts, and concerns. Bring them to your awareness. See if you can challenge their accuracy to change your point of view.

Remember, we are not only perceptual beings. We process and interpret data as well. We are intentional beings who place our focus here instead of there. We choose this action instead of that one.

Consider the fact that the sheer magnitude of unconscious data creates the need for a system of filters to organize incoming information. These filters become autopilot decision-makers for how we respond unconsciously, and they determine the content we perceive consciously.

Furthermore, we may not even be aware of those 40 bits that we take in consciously if we are not focused upon them. For example, I might notice your smile but not the clothes you are wearing while both are among my 40 bits that second.

Where does all this data come from? We gather data from our environment. We also gather information about how people treat us and how that makes us feel. Impressions are made.

Our visual perceptions dominate all others. Our brains give preference to visual information. Researchers L.D. Rosenblum, Harold Stolovitch, and Erica Keeps refer to our senses as learning portals. They offer the following statistics regarding the percentage of data processed by each of our five senses:

Sight *:  83%

Hearing:  11%

Smell:  3.5 %

Touch:  1.5 %

Taste:  1.0 %

*(both through our eyes and unconscious visual perception)

How Do We Decide What is Normal?

Patterns of “normalcy” are initially taught by others. We learn to catalog some things as good and others as bad. For the first five years or so of our lives, we are like little sponges. We absorb it all before our frontal cortex sufficiently develops for us to begin to evaluate our own perceptions. Thus, we begin by seeing through the eyes of others. And, they may or may not be seeing clearing themselves and might not have our best interests in mind.

Our sense of reality is skewed by the autopilot filtration settings of our data processing, largely programmed by others – our parents, teachers, friends, affiliations, and culture.

“If we do not intimately explore our perceptual framework, we will be its victim.”

What should we do?

“It is vital that we pay attention to how and why we function as we do.”

Here’s an example. One day, well into my own process of self-exploration, I made a profound psychosomatic connection. I held my arms fully extended in front of me with my hands turned upward like stop signs. This was to demonstrate to someone how I had been living my life. I had come to believe that I needed to protect myself. So I lived as though keeping everyone at arm’s length so they wouldn’t be able to get close enough to hurt me. It was a fundamental survival strategy I was unconsciously enacting. As I looked at my arms, I understood why I had developed carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists and bone spurs in my shoulders. Once seen, I began to deconstruct the scaffolding of this way of being. I consciously rolled my shoulders and dropped them at my side whenever I was scared or unsure of myself. This in turn caused me to experience the vulnerability of lifting my chest up and letting my heart lead me forward into the world. Through conscious and intentional repetition, I was able to override my old pattern. I stepped into a healthier and more trusting way of moving through the world.

This kind of remedial inner work is essential to personal freedom. We are all broken in some places within ourselves. But if we don’t take the time to find out where, we limp through life when we could be skipping.  Most people don’t do this inner work. Those who do have access to a kind of freedom and inner peace that is absolutely delicious. So, remember those two numbers and let them motivate you to do your inner work. It’s a matter of mental and emotional hygiene and ecology.

Remember as you move through this world, it doesn’t matter so much what is going on outside of us. It matters what we do with that inside ourselves. That is ultimately what determines whether we exist at the effect of external circumstances, or we thrive from the inside out.

If you would like to know more about me and my work, please explore my website here.