Try This: Clean something, with great attention to detail, for 20 minutes. Stop after 20 minutes, even if you’re not finished.
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In the last post, we looked at how we create hell with our thoughts. In this post, we’ll look at another way we put ourselves in hellish mental places: by resisting reality.
One way to resist reality is to set lofty goals for yourself. As the familiar proverb says, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Why are good intentions so dangerous? For a couple of reasons:
- An effort to be “good” can lead to a hellish mindscape, where you are consumed with anxiety about doing the right thing and anger at those who take advantage of your “goodness”
- Making a lot of empty promises to yourself about how you will improve yourself, what you will do differently, what you will achieve, etc., is likely to lead to guilt, shame, and anxiety
In other words…not being okay with where you are and who you are right now is a recipe for hell. In this case, hell feels like dissatisfaction, restlessness, guilt, shame, and resentment.
Let’s take addiction as an example. You’ve been through addiction treatment and are well into recovery. You have every “good intention” of staying sober and healthy for the foreseeable future. So when are these intentions helpful, and when do they become hell’s pavement?
Good intentions have a future-focus. Sobriety, as AA teaches, is a day-by-day process. You stay sober today, this moment. You don’t stay sober tomorrow or next year. All you have is today. When you make the future your focus, you lose contact with the present moment. When this happens, you are more prone to slipping up, to stumbling over an obstacle you never even saw because you were looking too far ahead.
There’s a metaphor that Alan Watts uses: beating the drum in search of the fugitive. Taken literally, when you beat a drum while looking for a fugitive, you’re defeating your purpose: the fugitive knows exactly where you are and how to hide from you. Watts used this idea metaphorically, meaning that when you announce your intentions to the world, you give your ego (the “fugitive”) the chance to thwart those intentions.
In other words, setting a lofty goal for yourself will make it that much harder to reach the goal. It pits your higher self in a fight against your ego, and your ego will likely win. The message is the same as the one above: one day at a time. Stay in the present. Attune yourself to how you are feeling today, what you’re experiencing today, and how you want to live today. In this way, you’re “living free” from the pressures of the future and the failures of the past.
When you stay in the present, you live “in collaboration with reality.” Pema Chodron uses this phrase when she writes about how to stay with our feelings rather than running away from or resisting them.
What does it mean to resist reality? Mostly, it means to resist what we’re feeling. We do this all the time. We wake up feeling exhausted but push ourselves to do everything on our to-do list. We get angry at our child or partner and stuff it down because we’re too afraid or too busy to deal with it. We feel sad, and it scares us–so we try our best to distract ourselves and escape the unpleasant feeling.
But here’s the thing. As unpleasant as the feelings may be, resisting them is worse. It’s human to feel a whole spectrum of feelings in a day. If we ignore them, we’re setting ourselves up for resentment and illness.
The trick is to accept that, just like the external weather changes day-to-day, our internal weather changes too. Instead of tensing up against the feelings, try to relax into them. Let them have their moment. Angry? Feel it, then put some ease around that anger. Sad? Feel it, then relax around the sadness.
It’s a fine line: you want to allow your feelings without clinging to them. If you latch onto a feeling and start feeding it with big, dramatic stories about how awful your life is, you create another kind of hell.
Managing feelings–and accepting reality–isn’t a lesson you’ll learn in a week. It takes a lifetime of practice. But the more you practice, the easier it will become to keep yourself free from the kind of hell that only we humans can create.