You did it, cleaned it up, but you couldn’t live that way, you couldn’t sustain the kind of you who whipped that place into shape. You eventually surrendered to your default self.
Sabotage, baby.
That magic little sponge of yours, the home of your three saboteurs, is not so magic now, is it? It’s hardened and coarse and impenetrable to anything new. Which means you’re stuck, and stuck living out the same stale patterns day after day, year after year.
Are you starting to get the picture? Every day of your waking life you begin at a certain familiar point of experience, made up of those three saboteurs we talked about earlier. That’s where they all come together to form your experience of being alive.
That point of experience isn’t a comfortable, cozy place but rather a place you are out to improve, to make better, to eventually overcome and triumph over. That’s why you live this “someday” kinda life, like one day this will all turn out, you’ll have arrived, and everything will be awesome. Right?
Have you ever noticed how everything you are after is always later? It’s never here, now. Even if that desired thing somehow does get accomplished, it gets replaced by another item or goal. So, you pursue that one now. Or you blow it up. Either way, it’s the same shit, different day.
You think you are pursuing goals like more money, or a new career, or fame, or the love of your life. But that’s an illusion.
As Sartre would have said, your life has been about “the pursuit of being.” You are pursuing “being” a different you, the kind of you who solves the dilemma of the current you, to somehow relieve the weight of your point of experience. Those goals? They are what you think will make you different or better!
But that’s the problem with pursuit. It’s a constantly hungry animal. It requires prey, over and over and over. You have become addicted to the chase. That hunger to “be” a different kind of you is never satisfied.
Why? Because you cannot “have” being like a possession. It’s un-have-able. You can’t contain happiness or satisfaction or confidence in a jar. Those are all fleeting experiences of being alive. They rise and fall, show up and then recede, yet we still try to capture them! We try to make solid something that is inherently liquid. You, my insatiable friend, are an expression of being. Your authentic self-expression is a limitless broadcasting of what it is to “be.” Yet you, like most human beings, rather than express happiness or love or passion, pursue those things with the idea that they are somehow attainable!
You are a human being. Yet you live as if you have some kind of limit or scarcity of being, and therefore you have become a human “doing”-to-eventually-“be.”
That thing you are after, the target of that pursuit, you ALREADY ARE! Do you get the complete insanity of this? Why would you spend a lifetime looking for confidence or passion or love when these expressions already exist deep within you, with all of the majesty and power of the oceans and the mighty span and magnitude of an endless mountain range?
LEARNING TO TAKE THE BAD WITH THE WORSE
By now, you might be thinking, “Dammit, Gary! I get it, I have problems, I’ve lived my life in a dumb chase. Tell me the good news already!” Most of us want to skip the hard shit and jump straight to the good parts. I get no enjoyment from people’s misery, but I haven’t met a worthwhile transformation yet that didn’t have some in it.
I want you to get better—but you need to stare this right in the eye. You need to look at what you have done (and are doing) with your life. The carnage of pursuit. The broken relationships, the failures, the regrets, the resentment, and yes, sometimes the despair.
Life isn’t a movie, where the struggle and the happy ending are only an hour or two apart. And you can’t fall asleep during the boring parts or cover your eyes when shit gets gory.
“Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Putting Hegel in other words, the journey of this book itself is part of this process. You have to get in touch with what it’s really like to be you, to be stuck in the grip of your conclusions, to fundamentally relate to being alive from your most basic point of experience. That’s what we’ve been working at in these pages—getting you in touch with who you have become, deep down, and where you are coming from.
We try to placate our conclusions with our accomplishments. We try to get away from them with our progress. But that gives you momentary relief, at best. The conclusions are still there. You’re still stuck at that same point of experience.
So, what can we do to get unstuck? Stop the striving and struggling, for starters, and just accept where you are. Be “here” for the moment. This moment. Attempting to overcome your point of experience is futile. You’re trying to outrun a treadmill. You can’t escape your conclusions by running. You can’t out-think, out-hustle, or out-meditate this shit.
Many people spend half their life trying to overcome their conclusions, but they invariably end up back in the same place. That realization often whacks you upside the head by the time you’re halfway through your thirties or forties.
Midlife crisis, anyone? It’s that moment when you realize you’re stuck. That you’ve been moving forward your whole life while staying in the same place. You notice that the point of experience is still there, and you’re left with the question “Is this it, is this all there is?”
From your point of experience, yes, this is it, this is all there is. Most people do one of two things in this moment. Either they settle down to a quiet, suffocating surrender or they rebel and make a drastic life change. It’s BS either way.
“Aging people should know that their lives are not mounting and unfolding but that an inexorable inner process forces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin—and certainly a danger—to be too much occupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to give serious attention to himself.”
—C. G. Jung
There has to be a point in this book where you start to see your life up to the present moment. Look at the clock. What time is it? What’s today’s date?
Your entire life up until right now has been about surviving and pursuing and surviving and pursuing. Step back a moment. Look at your life as an observer. Be honest with yourself here. This is not a time for you to indulge your optimism or resignation or even your drama. Take stock of how this life of yours has been going, not just in one area but in the whole of it.
This will require you to put some space between yourself and what you are currently seeing here. There needs to be a gap where you can step back and look at this for yourself in the cold light of day. On one hand, there’s you and this moment of time, and on the other is how your life has unfolded until now. Can you see it?
There has to be a real experience of you being able to observe your life from a distance instead of up to your back teeth in it.
No moving on until you have this down.
EMBRACING YOUR SHIT
Change begins with acceptance. Acceptance of what is already so. One cornerstone of Jung’s theory of the mind is that you have to accept every part of yourself—the good, the bad, the light, and the dark.
What does genuine acceptance look like? Let’s do a quick exercise.
Right now, think of something in your life that you barely, if ever, give thought to, something so mundane and benign it just fades into the background of your thoughts. It could be anything—the color of your car, your middle name, the light bulb above your head, the size of your feet. Any item that, when you give it some thought, has no impact on you one way or the other. You experience neither joy nor frustration nor sadness nor passion nor any emotional state connected to it. You literally experience nothing with regard to that item.
Do you know why that item has zero impact on you?
Because you genuinely accept that
item the way it is. You have no urge for it to be better or different or for it to change in any way. You’re not “past it” or “getting over it,” and you have no need to cut it from your life or barely even think, let alone talk, about it.
And so, it sits there. Accepted. Undisturbed.
It has no bearing on you because you accept it for what it is. That item is itself, and while it’s part of your life, it has no influence on you. There is no emotional tug at you.
That’s what true acceptance is for a human being. When you can let something be itself without any charge or reaction around that thing. When it has no influence, and I mean NONE, good or bad. Nothing either way.
You can’t ignore the darker parts of your unconscious. You can’t repress them. Because they don’t go anywhere. And oftentimes they just keep getting worse and emboldened by your attempts at having them go away or be somehow changed. Fueled by years of scratching that itch over and over and over. The basement of your mind is the perfect place for all your doubts and your fears to grow. Just as long as you keep giving them the sprinkle of daylight they need from time to time.
Until you accept them. Just right where they sit. In the dark.
Nothing to say about them, nothing to do with them other than let them be.
“Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
—C. G. Jung
That’s why we’re going to stop running from our conclusions, stop trying to overcome them through denial, avoidance, or never-ending effort. Dig into your conclusions. Investigate and explore them. Uncover your point of experience on the map.
Let yourself be present to those days, weeks, months, and years of self-sabotage, of the struggle to get better, of temporary victories and mind-numbing plunges into the depths of the darkness.
Let all of that up, sit in that stew . . . and then accept.
That’s right, accept all of it. Realize that these conclusions are only a part of you, not all of you. Make peace with the fact that they’re here to stay and that your struggle to change them is what makes them play such a big part in your life. Your unease has become your disease.
Let it be, right here, right now. Just as it is.
Acceptance is a practice. It’s a conscious exercise, a reminder—sometimes daily, hourly, or by the minute—to free yourself from your automatic reactions and triggers, to give yourself the space you need to forge a life free of self-sabotage and self-doubt.
To begin living from the space granted by acceptance.
* * *
You’ve been living on autopilot for most of your life. What would it look like to be able to recognize and turn that off? To wake up to your life? To feel fully alive?
If this life were no longer about you questioning your intelligence or your capabilities, if people were no longer a threat or controlling or untrustworthy, if life weren’t a struggle or a disappointment, how would that change things? What kind of life could you take on?
Who could you be?
12
Redirecting Your Way Outta This
What are you actually up to that would make this life of yours a truly great one?
Finally, we are at the bottom.
We’ve come a long way from that magic little sponge, the life circumstances you were thrown into, your established truths, and the three saboteurs. Your point on the map is now clear. THAT’S the life you have. It’s where you start every day, and it’s ultimately where you are fated to return.
It’s that repetitive, cyclical experience of yourself. The subconscious mechanism to keep life safe and predictable and survivable regardless of the cost to your aliveness or ambition.
This is why your life has been the way it has been. It stands to reason: if all of that is what got you to this point, it’s the course your life will continue to take. Things might get better here and there, one thing or another will change, but the flavor of your life, the limits, the boundaries, the direction it’s all headed, will continue.
But here’s the thing you’ve got to understand. Where did you get this mechanism? It’s all from the past. It was made in the past, forged in the moments of your life when you were forced to make sense of and survive a life that you were thrown into.
The reality is that every day is NOT a new day, because you are always starting from the burden of some of the earliest points of your childhood, continuing to act on those conclusions and carrying them into each day thereafter.
Your past dominates your potential. You don’t live a life of “anything is possible”; you live a life of “some things are possible, given my past.”
You’re stunted, limited, a dreamer with no chance of breaking out of this self-imposed prison. Every day you begin from the past. Every idea, every hope, every plan, all of it, begins back there. Is it any wonder you never get anywhere? Your starting point is pushed way back, and you are irretrievably anchored to it.
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
—Karl Marx
Earlier in the book when I said you’re asleep? This is what I’m talking about! You’re dozing off at the wheel of your life, maintaining a loop of the past. And at some level, you know it!
Everything you’re trying to do is only to subconsciously prove the legitimacy of what you concluded, to return you to your point of experience and set you off in pursuit again. Your pointless diets, your awkward and hellish exercise regimes, your crappy relationships, your litany of financial disasters and splintered dreams, your job that no one else would do, let alone die for, your ever-dwindling ambition.
You.
And you are always winning. Even when you are apparently losing, it’s a win for this cycle of BS.
You don’t just have to overcome life, or the immediacy of your concerns; you have to overcome yourself—and not your best self but rather your worst, most negative, most cynical self.
It’s as if you’re trying to win a marathon but you’re kicking off twenty miles behind everyone else. By the time you cross the starting line, the thing is almost over. Then back you go.
And that’s what all self-help is trying to address, whether it’s teaching you to set goals or do yoga or find your fucking purpose. It’s what we’re trying to change when we go on a diet, join a new gym, or start meditating. Every hope, every dream, every want, from that new car to that perfect partner or genius new business idea, it’s all just the latest strategy to overcome yourself. To finally solve the problem that YOU are! A quick-fix trick to make you better at a game that is designed never to be won and is completely stacked against you. And yet you keep playing! To change something that’s not changeable, and it’s all a setup. You get swindled and then you die. That’s how this goes.
STOP DOING THAT SHIT!! Wake up, you’re in a trap!
It’s what was sitting in the back of your mind when you decided to pick up this book. As if this would finally be the answer. There is no fucking answer!
So, what do we do with this thing that leads to our sabotage? Do we slay it? Fight it? Negotiate with it? Control it?
No. We do nothing. We do nothing with it. Let me expand this a little. Have you ever had a mosquito bite? Think about how itchy and annoying it is. You’re just dying to scratch or squeeze or stick a rusty pin into it or do whatever you have to do to rid yourself of this infestation that occupies your peace of mind.
Now, you and I both know that the less you touch or think of the bite, the better it gets. At the same time, the more you focus on it, the itchier and more annoying it seems. In short, the more you resist and get consumed by that bite, the worse it gets.
Or think about it this way. If you have kids, you’ll have done this. If you don’t have kids, you might have seen a Jedi-mom pull this shit on your flight to Albuquerque last fall. It’s called “redirection.” W
hen Mommy’s (or Daddy’s) little angel is starting to blow up like a two-foot volcano of venom, in steps the power of the redirect. Mom waves a toy, pulls out a magazine (a paper one, for the love of God), a piece of candy, or any mystery item at hand that could be spun into a dinosaur, wizard, giraffe, or Peppa Pig in an instant of imagination and pretend enthusiasm. Suddenly the gates to hell are closed and we’re treated to the giggly oohs and aahs that we all love so dearly as that cherubic face abandons the blind fury of a misunderstood generation in favor of something a little more lovable. And the entire plane breathes a sigh of relief. To themselves, of course, because no one is going to publicly admit their cranky ass to a bunch of strangers, are they?!
What happens in that magical moment of redirection? First, the upset is left alone, not interrupted or shushed to death, not even acknowledged. Next, an entirely new and much more interesting item is introduced. In that very moment, the child’s brain, like yours when focused authentically on something else, becomes so consumed by that new item that the other things seem to disappear from view. I call this an “authentic pivot.” When you shift your attention to what genuinely interests, inspires, or invigorates you, whatever was on your mind, whatever direction you were headed, is now altered. You’ve authentically pivoted, and your mind, your actions, and your focus are now engrossed in what naturally lights you up.
Your life will go in the direction of whatever you give your attention, time, energy, and actions to, even if you mistakenly think that what you are doing will eventually fix the problem. Constantly trying to fix problems fills your life with . . . problems.
Whatever you resist persists, by virtue of your resistance, remember?
You’ve been living your life according to the past, but you now need to make the pivot to make your life about what’s new, about your potential and your legacy. New emotional approaches, new behaviors, new habits, the kind of stuff that demonstrates the life you say you want.
Stop Doing That Sh*t Page 11