Transcription
Because we already are authentic. You can't not be authentic. You're just not in touch with it. And we have all these defenses and all these mechanisms with which we keep from being authentic, like being nice all the time. So that it's not a question of jumping in. It's a question of uncovering through patient and compassionate, kind self-observation, the way, the way in which you're not being authentic.
So one spiritual teacher says that liberation is not some, some great thing that you achieve all of a sudden. Liberation happens every time that you realize that you're not your personality. There's always fear in moving towards authenticity because we've been afraid. We've been, we've been taught since childhood to be afraid of our authentic selves because if we're our authentic selves, we're going to lose the world. That's the fear. There's always going to be fear there, and that fear has to be confronted, has to be recognized, understood, and accepted.
And Sier said the biggest stresses of human beings are emotional ones. And the biggest stress of all is trying to be who you're not. But how long ago did you find that out? You're still new at it. You're still learning. So instead of being frustrated with yourself about like when you say, "Why am I still like that?" Now, there's two ways to ask that question. If you say, "Why am I still like that?" If I said to you, "Why are you like that?" Is that a question or a statement? It's a statement. And what is the statement saying? You're not good enough. So when you ask it like that, you're accusing yourself. You're not actually asking a question. You're making an accusation against yourself that you're not good enough.
There's another way to ask the same question. I could ask you, "Gee, I'm curious. Why do you do that? Why are you like that? What do you suppose is behind that?" Is that a question or a statement? That's a question. Which one do you think you're more likely to answer? If I say to you, "Why are you like that? Why are you still doing this?" Or what if I said to you this? "Here's, here it is. Since you're 30 and an intelligent woman and you've learned all these things, but I'm noticing that despite what you've learned, you're still doing some of the same things that you used to do before. Now, why do you suppose that is?" Now, that's a question. Which one do you think you might more open up to? The first way of putting it or the second way?
So, that's the first thing is you've got to ask yourself the right way. In other words, you have to ask it with comp. You remember I said compassion for yourself. Compassionate curiosity. Say, "Why am I like that?" That's not a question. That's a statement. I already know I'm like that because I'm not good enough. But if you ask it compassionately with curiosity, then you might be able to come up with the answer. So I suggest that every time that question comes up for you, ask it with that compassionate curiosity rather than as a self-accusation. Then the answer will come to you because otherwise, if I attack you, what are you going to do? You're going to defend yourself. But if I treat you with compassion, you're going to open up.
There's a spiritual teacher who says, he says that only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth. So if you want to see the truth, you need to be compassionate with yourself. So if we want to overcome our habit energies. Now, for you to suppress yourself in the presence of some people is just a habit that you've learned very early in life that before you had any choice in the matter. It's ingrained in your brain. The brain circuits are telling you that if I'm authentic, that's not good. Those are your habit energies. So that's an automatic behavior for you. And that automatic behavior is there despite what you know intellectually, despite what you've learned. So those habit energies in certain situations will get triggered unless you train yourself very patiently. I mean, you wouldn't expect to go into a gym and press 150 lbs on the first day. You're going to press maybe 25 lbs. So right now you're pressing maybe 75 lbs. You want to press 150 lbs. You have to train yourself some more. Overcome those habit energies.
How many of you would acknowledge that at one time or another in your life you had an addiction? What did you get from it? What did it do for you temporarily that you wanted or craved? What was the benefit, the so-called benefit that you got from it? Pleasure is something we all want. In fact, it's necessary for life. The real question is, given God's green earth and everything in it, why did you lack pleasure in your life? Numbing. When do people have to be numbed? It's when you go to the dentist. This is when you're going to have pain. So, it's a response to pain. And comfort again is something that's a totally normal, normal human aspiration. The problem is that you were in so much discomfort that you didn't know what to do with it. And so that we see that the addiction is not a choice that you made, nor is it a disease that you inherited. It was an attempt to solve a problem. The problem of pain, so you had to be numbed. The problem of lack of pleasure, of alienation, of boredom, the problem of discomfort.
If we want to understand why you lacked comfort, why you lacked pleasure, why you had pain, we have to look at your life. And these factors always go back to childhood trauma in every single case. This is what we don't learn. We don't learn that human experience is shaped, or human functioning is shaped by human experience in the world. Yet another study talking about pain that shows that people with adverse childhood experiences are much more likely to have chronic pain as adults. Now, I could go into the physiology of that. It's very straightforward, but nobody teaches you that. So, all you see is a drug seeker. You don't see a traumatized person whose physiology is responding to painful childhood experiences.
The difficulty that we have is that we have trouble understanding people with different formative experiences than ours. And precisely because if I look at something like addiction, as you could see from the show of hands here, it really is a matter of a spectrum. And we're just about all of us are on a spectrum. But precisely because we're all on a spectrum and we think we could deal with this in our own life, we say, "Well, why couldn't they deal with it?" Anyway, we're full of judgment. Why couldn't they deal with it? If you've never been profoundly depressed, you don't have an idea what it's like to be depressed. You have no idea what it's like to have life be utterly drab and meaningless and threatening to the point that you might even want to leave life, to the point of trying to kill yourself because it is on a spectrum. And we've all felt down sometimes. We've all felt alienated sometimes, but we snapped out of it. And we have no idea what it's like to be deeply into it where choice no longer exists. And so we have great difficulty understanding people whose brains give them a different experience of life.
If you look at what actually triggers stress, the significant factors that trigger stress are uncertainty, lack of information, and loss of control. Now, what happens in a culture where the economy is going on a tube, where decisions are made far away by people who don't even know you and you don't know who they are, and your life is very much affected by these large forces over which you have increasingly a sense that you have no control or even influence over? Well, that means a lot of people are going to be stressed. A lot of uncertainty. A lot of people are going to be stressed. And that stress then will lead to addictive behaviors. That stress then will lead to parents passing that stress onto their children.
Alienation, which is a separation, being a stranger to something, and you're an alien to something. And Mark said there were four alienations in this culture. One is alienated from nature. At a conference dedicated to looking at the physical and the natural environment, we don't, I don't have to say much to you to show how alienated we are from nature when we're destroying nature itself. The second alienation is from other people. And that means we have less contact. We have less intimacy. We have less trust. We have less of a sense of relationship. And that, of course, as I've shown you, leads to increased propensity to illness, physical and mental. We learn it from our work. A lot of people no longer do work that has any meaning to them. And that means that, and since human beings are productive creatures, we really are created in the image of God. We're meant to create. When we do work that's not creative, that doesn't reflect who we are, that imposes depression, anxiety, a sense of meaninglessness. And when we have a sense of meaninglessness, we'll want to substitute that sense of meaninglessness or that sense of meaning that we've lost by all kinds of other activities. And then we got all hung up on how we look, or how people feel about us, what we can obtain, what we can possess, what successes we can achieve. In other words, all the false substitutes which cannot possibly compensate us for the lack of genuine meaning.
Finally, and most importantly, we become alienated from ourselves. How many of you had the following experience that you had a powerful gut feeling about something, you didn't pay attention to it, and you were sorry afterwards? Well, that needs to say, now you know what that you're telling me? You're telling me that at some point in your childhood, you got separated from yourself because no infant is born without gut feelings. That infants are totally connected to their gut feelings. That in this culture, something very powerful happens to alienate you from your true self because the world couldn't stand who you really were, and your parents were too stressed themselves to honor and recognize who you really were, just as a parent, I did that to my kids without meaning to. And then we become alien from ourselves. We shut down our gut feelings. And our gut feelings are not luxuries, you know, they tell us what is right and what is wrong. They tell us what is dangerous and what is friendly. They tell us what is safe and what is dangerous. And they tell us what is true and what is false. So when from our gut feelings, we have no longer have a sense of reality, no longer a sense of truth.
Well, the good news is that human beings can regain their sense of connection to themselves, just as we can regain our sense of connection to our nature. And empathy, which is a genuine human quality, is in us. We're actually wired for empathy. That's our nature as human beings. So contrary to the myth in our culture that we're separated, individual, aggressive, competitive creatures, we're actually wired for empathy, wired for connection, wired for love, wired for compassion.
Let me talk to you about stress for a moment. So stress has three components, and this is maybe the takeaway. There's the external event called the stressor. It depends on the individual of how they perceive and experience a particular event. So the first component of the stress reaction is the event. Okay. The third and final component of the stress reaction is the physiological stress response with the adrenaline and the cortisol and the nervous system and the gut and the heart and really the whole body. But in between the external event and the physiological reaction is what we can call the processing apparatus. And the processing apparatus is you and I with our particular interpretations or beliefs, usually unconscious interpretations, unconscious beliefs, internal and emotional dynamics that we have no control over until we become conscious of them. So the really the whole point of this talk is to become conscious of what's happening inside us.
But you see, we all tell ourselves these stories. And these stories often run our lives. And to the extent that they're unconscious, and to the extent that we keep suppressing ourselves for the sake of attachment, for the sake of being accepted and loved and respected and accepted by others, and we're disconnected from our true selves. To that extent, we're stressing ourselves. And to that degree, we're actually making ourselves sick. And from that point of view, illness comes along to teach you something. Now, I'm not inviting you to get sick to learn this lesson. Nobody wishes that on anybody else whatsoever. What I am saying is that when illness does come along, who, when they did get sick, rather than just simply see it as a calamity to battle against, they also saw it as an opportunity to learn. And what people keep learning over and over again is how they had not been themselves. Illness came along to bring them back to themselves. That's what they keep learning.
Nobody should be a passive recipient on everybody else's care. We need to regain that sense of agency. Is that sense of agency of actually making the decisions and actually looking at our lives and our patterns and our dynamics and really being courageous about that and being open about it and being supremely curious and not judging ourselves. "Oh God, I failed. I was too nice. I pushed myself down." No, but ask yourself, "Okay, why was I doing that? And do I really need to do that? Am I still really that infant, a young child who needs to choose attachment over authenticity?" And yes, I may lose some friends who have you are used to me being this particular way and that's what they signed up for. But my true friends will celebrate me. And the biggest stress of all is trying to be something other than who you are. So if this takeaway lesson here, it's get to know who you are and be who you are. The true self, the authentic self is never lost. In fact, there's a very interesting word that we use when it comes to illness or addiction. What's the word that we use when people get better? They recover. What does it mean to recover? It means to find something. Well, if you find it, it means it could never have been lost.