HOW GOOD WAS I? COMPARING YOURSELF INTO A FUNK

             It’s been a hard few days, I must confess. Not sure why. I think it’s the economy. People are struggling. I feel under-utilized. My circuits jammed on me. I had a meltdown. Found myself very frustrated. Negative. Physically upset with a headache that wouldn’t respond to meditation or medication.

Who wants to hear about a helping professional and life coach having a trying few days? 

“I have enough of those, myself,” I can hear you saying, “I don’t need to hear about yours.”

I was worried. How could I write something that might help someone else when I can’t keep myself from feeling this way?

I felt like a bit of a sham.

I sometimes envy people who seem to glide through life, like the old James Bond, seemingly without a sensitive, self-reflective moment of doubt, worry, weakness, or a bit of despondency.

Do those people really exist? They might, and bully for them. Oh, I have my days, and even my weeks and months, when things are just going swimmingly and everything is great with the world, days when I could probably kick 007’s butt.

Then there are, what I call, the ‘drowning’ days, days when I have to work hard to keep from sinking. And though they’ve gotten fewer and further apart and less severe, I still have my drowning days. That’s how it is.

I know there are billions who have to struggle. Maybe everyone struggles, sometimes, and James Bond is a big fat liar. He leaves out the parts where he’s lonely, and worries about that arthritic shoulder and, well, sometimes, even with a beautiful woman, he just doesn’t seem, well, as solid down there as he once was.

Know what I mean?

Sure you do.

Anti-depressants, anxiety medication, joints, pints, and kegs are sold by the boatload each hour to help us get through the tough work of being a human being.

Maybe that’s what it’s all about: how you make it through the tough times, how you behave, how you show up, how you keep going.

Do you get your work done, the real work of living? Can you keep loving those around you, lending a helping hand and a listening heart? Can you forgive yourself when you fall so that you can get up stronger and more quickly?

The Prophet Mohammed said, “There will always be times tougher than these.”
The Buddha said suffering is part of the world.

So, it’s all about how you handle the tough times. How you learn from them. How you take responsibility and action. How you move on.

The tough times will always be with us.

But why do I compare myself to others, even James Bond, or to myself on better days?

It was the teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti who first showed me the damage we cause by comparing. I can hear his high distinctive voice with his British-Indian accent and I can see his raised finger as he admonished his listeners, “Never to compare.”

What would a mind be like if it were never to compare, but to simply be with itself just as it is from moment to moment?

There is a Buddhist practice of labeling our thoughts and feelings as they are happening. You experience a thought and you label it, “thinking,” for instance. You feel an emotion, and you label it, “fear”, and so on.

But that already has a separation between the part of you that is experiencing the emotion or thought, and the part that is labeling it.

It seems you have to compare your experience to something else to be able to know it is fear, or anger, or desire, or joy.

You have to compare it before you can label it.

But what if you could never compare?

Wow.

But what did I do just then? Did I compare my good-old comparing self to some amazing me who might someday never compare?

What a drag, because obviously you can’t use comparison as a way to get to a point in your life where you no longer compare, just like you can’t go north by going south.

            Never to compare, and to go on doing your work and living your life from moment to moment. What would that be like?

But if I don’t compare, you might ask, how will I know how I’m doing?

Why does it matter? Why do you need to know how you are doing? Who will tell you? How will you keep score? What will it mean?

Of course you might use a scale to see how your weight is doing, and things like that, but you would not use anything to tell you how you were doing. That’s the kind of comparison we’re talking about, not whether this box of cereal is a better deal than that box. Never to compare your self with anyone and anything, but to simply be yourself from moment to moment.

What would that be like?

I don’t know, but I do know the pain of comparison. That I know. Comparison has often made me miserable.

There’s an old eastern teaching that says, “You suffer because you spend 99% of your time thinking about your self, but there isn’t one.”

I think comparison gives rise to the self. When you are not comparing, but just being and doing in the moment, it’s like you, your self, are not there. You forget about yourself and simply drop into life. When you’re really happy, you don’t know about it in the moment, because you’re so in the thick of your happiness. It’s only afterwards, when it’s over a little bit, that you can compare and notice how happy you were. You have to come out of your happiness a bit to even know that you’re happy.
 It’s like a great orgasm. In the middle of it, you’re gone. That’s what we love about it. Great sex or lovemaking is one of the best ways to get out of your own head so that you’re not there for a while.

And then, of course, we return and say, “Wow, that was great. Can we do that again?” It's amazing how good it feels to have your doors blown off for awhile so that you're gone, even if only for a moment or two.

 Check it out for yourself. Observe how comparing serves you and hurts you. Let me know what you think.

So, there it is. I wrote it. My commitment is two articles per week and this is article number two. That’s all I can tell you. You put one foot in front of the other, eyes open, mind quiet or mind in turmoil, you do what you can to keep walking the walk. You walk through fear, confusion, doubt, worry, moodiness, and even depression. You walk like you’re on some great mission like Frodo, in Lord of the Rings, because you are. You are walking the path of your one and only life—at least till you get to heaven or you reincarnate.

             Namaste. 
             I can be reached at drjohnluca@gmail.com or 805/680-5572.

NEAL YOUNG AND EMINEM SHARE SOME SECRETS

Whoever you are and whatever you’re up to, you know when you set about to do something new, whether it’s write a new piece, go to a new class, talk to a new client, start that exercise program, or learn something new, especially if it pushes against your boundaries, you know resistance is lurking, resistance that hides in that tightness in your gut, in that irresistible urge to clean the refrigerator, in that seductive call of a bar of chocolate, or the allure of that nasty website.

Here I am writing, as a dozen little itches, distractions, thoughts, desires, judgments and genies try to draw me away and keep from doing my work this morning.

“Why are you doing this?” they ask me. “No one will listen. It won’t make a difference. It won’t be any good. It’s been done already. Who are you to do this work anyway? Don’t you need to go do something more productive that will make more money?”

Resistance will try to make you forget what you are doing and why. You have to pull yourself back to the center where your work and your life are waiting for you.

I saw an amazing interview with Neal Young on the Charlie Rose show—Neal Young from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, who wrote Ohio, Southern Man, and has been rockin’ in the free world for over 40 years.

Day in and day out, married to the same woman, suffering from epilepsy, father of kids with cerebral palsy, Neal plays on. 

Neal Young explained to Charlie Rose that everyone who knows him, knows that when Neal hears the ‘call’, unless there’s a life or death reason not to, he’s going to answer it.

Tired. Having fun. Down. Busy. Worried. Guilty. Afraid. None of it is going to stop Neal Young from heeding the call to go write that music and those lyrics.

            It was a gift, he explained. It had been, not given to him, but offered to him. He had accepted. Now it was his responsibility to show up.

            That was the deal. He’s given his life to this thing, and it has given him his life.

I imagine some of you are saying, damn, I wish I were Neal Young. Where’s my muse? I wish I were called like Neal Young to write a song, or a poem, or to paint, or to sculpt, or take a photograph, or to design a product, or create a business, or choreograph a dance, or code a cool I-phone app, or run an amazing experiment, or think of a new line of work, or called to come up with a novel solution to a problem.

I’d give anything. Just please call me!

Like former President Clinton, I can feel your pain, but, sorry, I don’t believe you.

You have heard the call. We all have. More than once, but you didn’t heed it. You were too busy, too tired, too afraid, too something. And now, you think you don’t hear it anymore.

            But it’s there. The whole universe is bursting with the call. No matter where you look, there is change and creation. You are part and parcel of a God-refined creation machine. There’s destruction and decay, too, but you have to destroy some of the old to make way for the new. Destroying the old, that’s the part that scares us.

In Rolling Stone, Eminem shared that fear was one thing that made him do so many damn drugs in the past, fear of failure, fear of not being good enough, fear of being too connected to all those adoring fans. One of the most successful musicians alive has to face fear and anxiety.

Neal and Eminem have to face their demons before they can answer the call. So do you, and so do I, if we hope to do our work.  

The particulars are going to be different for each of us, but once you get the inkling of the direction of your contribution, whether it’s to make your job more meaningful, to write that poem, or to be more present to those children, you’ve got to show up every day like Neal. Commit. Get professional. Get your crap out of the way. Sit down, stand up, go in, go out, whatever answering the call looks like to you, do it everyday—at least every workday.

Act like you hear the call even when you think you don’t. Keep doing your work. Keep showing up. The call is there, like leaves rustling in the wind. If you’re not paying attention, you won’t hear it. In doing the work, the call becomes clearer.

You don’t wait. You act. You don’t clean the refrigerator. You don’t call that friend. You sit down and you write. You go out and take those pictures. You learn that skill. You send out that resume. You go to that exercise class. Even with nineteen kids, four husbands, and eight cakes baking, you do what has to be done. And you keep doing it. Why? Because your life depends on it, just like Neal’s life and Eminem's life depend on it.

So, learn your craft, which includes studying the ways of your own mind and personality. Observe the deviousness of your excuses, the disabling power of your limiting beliefs and self-criticism. Observe your broken-heartedness over the past. Forgive yourself for things done and not done. Get out of your own way.

Your life is calling you, right here, right now, to be who you are.

And that’s pretty exciting, and damn frightening.

“My God, if I could just be fully and completely who I am, it would be like heaven. But what if I fail? What if they laugh? What if they ignore me?”

That’s fear we have to face, step by courageous step, as we work to become who we are called to be. And we do it knowing we will never be fully who we are. We’re too much of a mystery for that. The best we can hope for is to be a living part of a universe that is a becoming more than it is a thing, more of a dance than a sculpture. There’s no end to it.

So, where is your place in the great dance? What music do you hear? Who are your partners? What is your instrument?

Whatever it is, be open to it. Work to find it. Do what you can.

Listen. Do you hear it? Your life is calling.

Namaste. I can be reached at drjohnluca@gmail.com or 805/680-5572.