Lesson # 2. From Rock Bottom
In order to get what you want, stop clinging to what you don’t want.
Why would anyone cling to what they don’t want? Because it’s familiar. Because they don’t know what they actually want. Because the idea of not having anything or anyone is extremely frightening. Because you think the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. Because you don’t have the patience to wait for what you want. The reasons as to why we cling to things and people and situations that aren’t good enough are many. The alternatives seem too scary. But the most important lessons that you will learn while falling to rock bottom, while you’re down there trudging through the muck trying to get back up, while you’re engulfed in flames and being reborn from the ashes is surrender and letting go. Stop resisting it. That makes it worse. Yes, there will be an intermediate space and time where you have nothing and no one, where you’re all alone with yourself, where your life is falling apart and everything is being taken from you, where everyone abandoned you, where you realize everything you knew, everything you were told was complete and utter bullshit and that you were not yourself, you were this thing that world and other people had tried to mold you into and forced you to be through reward and punishment. You need to go through this space and time where all those old thoughts, feelings, relations, the old programming and conditioning, the old facsimile of a self dies. Death takes time. The body and your mind need time to recalibrate and reprogram. This is an organic process that you must surrender to. This is change and growth. If you resist or impede it through clinging or because this temporary but necessary pain of death of things that aren’t working anymore seems too much to bear, this catharsis and salubrious purge, you will suffer even more. Better to die and be reborn and let new things grow than to be a zombie. The living dead cling to what they don’t want, to long dead relationships they should have thrown away much sooner, to jobs they tolerate or hate but distract themselves from as soon as they get home. Awareness hurts. Awareness angers and enrages you. It makes you feel powerless. You will not always be able to jump from what you don’t want to what you do want. You will have to take the next best step that you can reach. Use it as a means to a greater end. This could be, for example, taking a job that enables you to move out of a toxic environment and give yourself space and air and time to rest, relinquish, repair, recalibrate, replenish, retrospect, and respect yourself giving yourself the utmost patience, kindness, compassion, tenderness. Let every emotion, convulsion, fear, rage, resentment, bloodlust, indignation, despair, horror, disgust, shout, cry traverse your body. All those things that were buried, that the child you were had to bury because they couldn’t understand it, because they weren’t listened to or were gaslighted, invalidated, dismissed. Let it all erupt and let the hot magma consume this deformed self, the cognitive distortions, these shackles and blindfolds the world put on you. This is your time. These are death pangs and birth pangs. The world can wait. See you on the other side.
