TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE
On a sacred mountain in Tecate, Mexico, I am the hiking guide for a group of successful leaders from all over the United States. It’s a warm, late-spring day in 2009. Century plants are bursting into bloom like popcorn on a hot flame. The view is spectacular, the company superb, and I’m feeling like I just won the work-life lottery.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spot something ahead, slithering across the path.
SNAKE!
In an instant, with one thought, the glorious feeling I’d been experiencing blew up. The panic was instant. I began breathing heavily, it felt as though my major organs were shutting down, and the urge to pee like a pack mule was overwhelming. My mind raced. How could I survive a snakebite on a mountain? All I could come up with was a technique I remembered from a John Wayne movie—not savvy but all I had. He’d heroically whipped out a knife, cut an X over the fang marks in his hand, and sucked out the snake venom. I reached for my pocketknife, preparing to perform self-surgery and save my own life.
Wait. No way would I be able to suck venom out of my own ankle. That’s when I knew: I was going to die.
I summoned the will to take a few tentative steps forward. The huge, venomous snake was … well, it was a piece of rope that had fallen off someone’s saddlebag. I felt relief that I would live, but I still needed to pee like a pack mule.
What was the cause of my stress? What almost ruined my beautiful moment in the mountains? What almost ended my life? A piece of rope?
Nope. It was my story about the rope. I created that story and wholeheartedly believed it. My story centered on fear: False Events Appearing Real. That part of the brain I call ego told me a tale that the rope was a snake. I believed the story, and my suffering began.
The reality of that morning was that I was healthy and hiking with a group of wonderful people in an amazing natural setting. When I saw “the snake,” reality didn’t change, but my story did. The story moved me from heaven to hell as my feelings of contentment and bliss disappeared. In one second, I went from thinking “This is the best job in the world” to “They can’t pay me enough to do this job!” And I believed that thought without even questioning it.
When I later realized that the story was causing my pain, not reality, I suddenly understood something I had been witnessing my entire life. For example, when I was a child, I witnessed the pain of my parents divorcing. What ruined their marriage? Well, my mom passionately believed a story: SHE was right. And my dad was emphatic about his story: HE was right. Each believed what their thoughts were telling them: “I AM RIGHT!” And that story trumped any desire to be happy in their marriage. How sad a story is that?
I also saw ego-based stories’ role in suffering as a graduate student doing research on workplace drama. Doctors were asked to switch to a computerized patient documentation system and were given training. Simple. But instead of accepting a new reality, they created and believed stories that the change would limit their ability to care for patients. Rather than seeing an opportunity to improve patient care, the doctors told themselves change was a burden. They created a story of being victimized.
The stories we create and believe will direct our actions. In the doctors’ case, instead of investing in learning and becoming fluent in new technology, they spent their time complaining and resisting. Not only did those actions have the potential to jeopardize their careers, the possibility of affecting their patients’ health was also very real. The change was mandated, and it happened. Doctors began using the new system, but in the process of confronting a new reality, they created unnecessary suffering.
SELF-IMPOSED SUFFERING
That morning on the mountain in Mexico, when the story of the snake was superseded by the reality of a rope, something important clicked for me. I realized clearly that suffering is optional and mostly self-imposed.
Stress and suffering don’t come from reality, they come from the stories we make up about reality. Of course, painful things happen. Pain is part of life. But the drama in stories we create in the wake of pain causes the suffering we complain about.
What might happen if you stopped believing everything you think? What if observing your thoughts was followed with a pause, stepping back with questions, and self-reflection? Employing these simple actions allows you to bypass ego and access the best part of your brain. The simple act of self-reflection is the ultimate drama diffuser and is an effective way to eliminate suffering.
My first career was counseling, talking with people one-on-one. As promotions at work led to leadership roles, I saw the ways emotional energy expended on believing the ego’s stories results in drama and tremendous wastes of emotional energy. I felt so passionately about helping people see this that I invented a new career—drama researcher—because I wanted to quantify the waste and help folks reduce suffering in their lives by living drama-free.
My research put a number on the time people at work lose to drama: 2.5 hours per day. That’s 150 minutes daily that’s gone—poof!—lost in unproductivity. Two and a half hours of your day equals 816 precious hours a year spent in self-inflicted pain. We seek to relieve the daily pain with big doses of venting, complaining, gossiping. We invest energy in trying to figure out why that colleague is so lazy and why the boss is a control-freak jerk.
You know what’s worse than the lost time? Believing you’re at the mercy of circumstances. Seeing insult where none exists. Feeling miserable because you want control and can’t have it. Wallowing in victimhood.
I call those perceptions, when you focus on everything that sucks, living in “low self.” You feel bad. Everyone around you feels bad. It’s a pretty terrible place to be, and yet we choose to go there. Every. Single. Day. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
CHIPPING AWAY AT THE PIECES
After carving one of his masterpieces, the statue of David, Michelangelo supposedly was asked, “Was it hard carving such an amazing statue?”
His reply: “No, it wasn’t hard at all. I simply removed anything from the marble that wasn’t David.”
What might life be if instead of searching for happiness or working hard to be more innovative, you realized you already were those things? What if happiness and success are your natural state once you shed the drama? All you have to do is chip away the things that aren’t you.
Imagine a toggle switch, right there in the middle of your head. When it is toggled down, you see the world through the ego’s lens. Circumstances are the source of your suffering. You are the victim of reality. You try to make yourself feel better by judging, venting, tattling, scorekeeping. Low self.
When you are toggled up, you can see the world differently. Compassion rises. You choose to help rather than judge. You are full of ideas and see options that allow you to have an impact in the world. Say hello to your high self. In this toggle setup, you can’t be in low-self and high-self at the same time. It is impossible to be truly helpful when you’re in judgment mode.
How do you flip your own toggle switch? With self-reflection—the ultimate drama defuser. You can’t vent and self-reflect simultaneously. In fact, venting is the ego’s way of avoiding self-reflection. The best way to bypass the ego—the story, the judgment, the suffering—is self-reflection.
Over time, I discovered three simple questions that have been crucial to initiate self-reflection and set myself free from suffering.
Question 1: What Do I Know for Sure?
This question almost instantly helps release the ego’s clench on my worldview. Without changing anything, it changes everything. Suddenly a micromanaging boss becomes a manager who prefers more detail than I like to give. An idea from someone else is something to think about, not something that ruins everything I have worked for. The militant DMV employee trying to ruin my dang life becomes someone who informs me the office is closing for the day and lets me know when I can return to renew my license.
The ex-husband trying to wrest my children away from me becomes a dad asking for an extra day with his kids.
In all these cases, reality wasn’t causing pain. The stories about my circumstances that I’d chosen to believe created suffering—like that day on the mountain where I almost lost my life to a piece of poisonous rope.
Focusing on what you know for sure, rather than what your low-self tells you, means reflecting on what’s happening and seeing reality for what it is. Rarely is reality as bad as it seems.
I remember asking a nurse working on a full unit at a hospital how things were going one day. He said, “Oh, things are crazy. They’re just totally, totally crazy.”
I said, “Really, is that true? Are things really crazy? I know they’re busy, but are things really wildly unmanageable? Where did the crazy part come from?”
Copyright © 2022 by Cynthia Wakeman
