I am Amazing // I Suck

I am Amazing // I Suck

Especially in the USA people are programmed, by the culture, to be one or the other, amazing or amazingly awful. While you will certainly have moments of being either of these, living from only these two extremes is a recipe for madness via the imbalance of black and white thinking. Thinking of your Self this way will also influence you to experience life in a similar fashion, everything is awful or everything is fantastic. What a roller coaster ride you are in for and  this will exhaust both your brain and body chemistry which can in turn contribute to auto-immune disorders (fibromyalgia, cancer, lupus, irritable bowel, Epstein-Barre, so many more).Then life really will suck as these conditions are for the most part irreversible and will require a lifetime of management.

Life in balance is an art form. Eat to be healthy and eat to enjoy, rest and work, thinking and intuition are all some of the areas of balance. When you live life as a work of art there really is no criticism, just adjustments made to enhance the work of art. Stroke by stroke you create.  Life rolls in and you get to ride the waves. Each wave takes a new set of balance points. Resting between waves means you get to lay in the sun and soak it all in. Riding out a rainstorm challenges you and is exhilarating and then makes the sunny days all the more glorious because of the contrasts. Constant sunshine, constant weather, you are describing the desert, or the Antarctic.

A primary tool for living in balance is taking inventory. In many Spiritual Paths it is part of a daily practice. Inventory requires you list specific facts about what you are doing, eating, spending, feeling, saying, even thinking (also the work of cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical therapy).  Writing out inventories on an ongoing basis will help you look at yourself with more detachment instead of criticism or over the top praise that is often used as a form of denial to cover depression or accountability.  Most people I work with bail when asked to do inventories. They are very invested in their stories about who they are and what they are doing and looking at facts is too challenging. An inventory means getting very specific about what is happening in your daily life and includes what you are proud of and what you are not proud of. Writing an inventory will stir up emotions and often times you will need to work with someone until you become more balanced and detached. (Detachment does not mean not having feelings. It means you easily feel and easily release. Flow.)

When you think you suck, get out your Journal (still nothing beats the physical act of writing as it appeals to so many of your neurons and learning styles) and start tracking what IS working right now.  Refocus to rebalance, not to go into denial or a Pollyanna Disneyland outlook, but rather to teach your neurons to notice the good along with the challenges, the fun with the sorrow, the passion with the anger. Refocusing means to switch to a wide angle lens and stop micro zooming into what is currently driving you crazy with criticism. This is work, not an affirmation. Like getting fat and going on a diet, this is you getting your brain patterns of beating yourself up on a new diet. There will be some resistance, and it will take some time to shift into a new and different pattern.

This doesn’t mean don’t’ be sad, or depressed, or have a pity party. It means don’t live from that energy. Don’t make decisions from that perspective. Go there to vent, then balance out.  Go there to vent, then balance out.  You might have to do this twenty times a day (or more) some days. You might fail. But you will get there, to a place where the “I suck” does not dominate. It might rent a room in your brain, but it is no longer the landscape.  “I suck” is completely unrealistic. If you did you would not have a job, relationships, pets that like you, past successes, etc. Force yourself to look at the evidence that you do not suck. Then add in what IS working, right now. No matter how small, it counts. After all most people are experts at adding up minutiae on every single detail of how they suck. If you are used to doing that, automatically, it is your old go-to habit. Writing out what is working will help you form a new go-to habit called what IS working and balance will become the new norm instead of the pendulum swings.

If you continually operate from an “I suck” energy, you will end up manipulating people into constantly having to complement you and emotionally support you.  When you are balanced, you learn to maturely and honestly ask for support rather than present as a victim, suffer, and wait to be rescued or receive condolences. When you come from an “I suck” place, no one can hold you accountable, for anything grown-up be it actions or emotions. After all, you are wounded and you can only handle receiving comfort and assurances that you are, wait for it, amazing.  This will grow from manipulative into controlling behavior as you will eventually only allow comments and “vibes” from people who unconditionally support you and do not question the reality you are presenting. Then no one is allowed to even ask you questions, and if they do, and sense you are presenting a skewed perspective, or even lying (including lying by omission or lying to yourself) you will attack them for being cruel and heartless, in other words, not buying your story. When one is more in balance, your “presentation” of life can be discussed and questioned. That means you are strong enough to receive mature help  and answer questions and explore possibilities, rather than only accepting the support you manipulate to get because that is all you can hear or want to hear.

“I am amazing” is a dangerous place to go if you are a black and white thinker because what goes up must come down.  Perhaps a safer place to go to, until balance becomes more the norm for you, is “my life is amazing”.  This teaches you to look at the good and be thankful.  Surfers seem to always be aware of how fragile their “amazing-ness” is because it is so based on one’s relationship to Mother Nature and involves lots of intuition, timing, and luck (or karma) in addition to training and dedication and practice. That outlook keeps one humble while also allowing one to celebrate enormous “wins” such as riding a monster wave into shore.  The new age in addition to the USA culture worships and promotes self-adulation with slogans such as “you deserve it” (when sometimes we don’t, and who knows what past life karma is in play),  celebrate yourself, go for it, etc.  How about instead celebrating the whole picture, your efforts, karma and fate, and a great ride on a great wave? None of this says you are amazing (which means at some point you will suck because amazing simply cannot last forever), it says your life, at this moment, including your participation in it, your connection to Self and Spirit, is amazing.

“I am amazing, I suck” is also the position of atheism.  Nothing wrong with that, however if you want to work with Spirit you are missing the “we” of your team: you in this life, your Higher Self, and Spirit.  It is you passing judgement on everything you are doing in your life from the limited perspective of your tiny left brain.  How about a team perspective? When there is a touchdown in football, there may be a star but there is also the entire team, always. When there is loss, the entire team works together to improve. You are a team. Don’t distance yourself by being the “amazing” one or the “loser”. Keep perspective by tuning into the team. How well you worked together, what was learned (as opposed to just looking at the result or expectations), how strong your connection is getting, how resilient, flexible and open you have become and how much fun you all had together as a team, you and Spirit.

Working as a team is just that, work. You sit down with the team, congratulate each other, celebrate everyone’s contribution, enjoy each other’s company, talk out problems and issues, make plans on how to do it better in the future or make notes on what really worked so you can easily access it in the future. How do you work with your team?  Meditate, write, talk out loud (somewhere you won’t be locked up), draw, paint, write poetry, talk to trees, work with crystals. In simple words, have a Spiritual Practice. Don’t be reluctant to work with someone, a Teacher, a Healer because teams always have coaches. 

Celebrate your life, celebrate you. Remember you are not a mistake; that is toxic shame speaking, and arrogance, as if you know better than Spirit that you are some kind of mistake.  You will make mistakes, but you are not a mistake. And your awesomeness is in part from your efforts but also due to your relationship to your team. You are never alone. Feelings are feelings, not reality; they are a part of reality.  Live from the whole picture, the big picture of you as  a soul having a human experience. When your feelings throw you out of balance, nurture yourself and get to work.  It is a very different life to live as an awakened being and you are, at this point of history, in the minority percentile of the population. There are great rewards to be had, great joy. Life will be in sharp focus for you and you will be living like a dolphin in your ocean of energy and Spirit. However it also means your balance point is much more fine-tuned and therefore needs more attention and care, like surfing the big waves or skiing the double black diamond slopes.  Living awakened is an extreme sport and that takes more focus and mindfulness. The rewards are immense. Own it, and enjoy it.

Journey On.