Lessons from 30 years of living

Belief is nature's most powerful placebo and the foundation of our expectations. We shape our lives based on our experiences and as we grow, change and evolve, we do so out of the belief systems we put in place. A lot of maturation in life is the disabling of old, negative belief systems, set up by parents and loved ones, teachers and strangers, friends and enemies. As young people in this world, we end up accidentally accepting other people's beliefs as if they were our own. We watch the people around us go through failure, success, love, and trauma, and we slowly learn how to think and act. The problem with this is that we are all experiencing a slightly different version of life and each individual's life experiences will eventually shape them differently.

As we mature, it is important to reflect deeply, in your own time and in your way, so that you may develop your own beliefs about the world around you, based on your worldview. In doing so, you have the opportunity to cast out the negative habits picked up from other people's pain and bring forth ones that enable more love and understanding. It can be hard at times to know which beliefs are helping and which are hurting us. Often, what we think is what we believe in hiding. When you put the idea into the context of "I believe…" and speak it out loud, then you can often see from an external perspective, what value the perspective should hold. Imagine it was a dear friend telling you the same thing and if it sounds as if the belief in question is harmful, discard it. If it is still difficult to know which way to go, break it down further.

Does it have a quality that resembles any of the following; love, compassion, resilience, optimism, acceptance or understanding? If so, it will most likely help you along your journey in life. If, however, it holds a quality of selfishness, hatred, pessimism, or guilt, then there is a high chance it is hurting you, both in the long term and the short. Ask yourself, does this help me or hinder me? Am I holding on to this because of fear? it is important to be serious with your inquisitions and hold yourself to a high standard because no one else will and it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility but your own.

Grief

Throughout my life, I have found that people only associate grief with death, as if the two are intertwined. Grief indeed holds an important role in healing after a loved one has died but it should not be held for this reason alone. We need to use this emotion to better compartmentalize the pain and trauma we go through on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Doing so will help each of us to move on through the pain we hold and to let it go so that it does not hold the same power over us.

One metaphor I like to use to put this in perspective is to imagine my pain and trauma like dirty clothes in my laundry basket. If you were to allow your basket to become overflowing with dirty clothes they would spill over the sides and onto the floor, cluttering the room and making it difficult to see clearly. After a while, there will be so many clothes that you have forgotten what the room looks like, to begin with. It has slipped your mind that beneath all these soiled fabrics lies a solid foundation. As you go through your life, make sure to organize your dirty clothes, i.e, painful thoughts and memories, and get to work cleaning them. Sit with them, separate them, clean them of your guilt or shame or regret or whatever it is that is holding you back.

Process them as you would a basket of dirty clothes and when you have finished with each article of clothing, hang it up for good in the back of your closet. Not so that you will forget it exists, but so that it does not clutter your mind with the unnecessary. To do this completely it might mean phoning up old friends and apologizing, it may mean coming to terms with your mistakes, it might also mean realizing you are not whom you thought you were, or another person is not the person you made them out to be.

All in all, it is better to realize these things earlier, rather than later. In doing so, you get more resiliency earlier in life to better overcome the negative, difficult things that are inevitably to follow. It also means coming to peace earlier, which will allow you to better enjoy this short life we are gifted with.

Karma and the Train of Pain

In modern, western society the term Karma is often used to give a middle finger to those that apparently “deserve it!”. However, all this does is harm the person that wishes bad things will happen to another. Let me tell you this right now, it doesn't matter who has hurt you, when they hurt you, how they hurt you, etc., wishing hurt on anyone continues what I like to call the ‘Train of Pain’ which inevitably harms yourself.

Karma is more accurately translated into “action” than it is “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people”. Guess what, good things and bad things happen to all people, regardless of their karmic state. Nature is not about a balance of morality. There is no individual in the sky ensuring all people receive in life that which they dish out. This notion is not meant to produce feelings of helplessness or doubt, it is instead meant to help each of us understand our responsibility in our lives and how to hold ourselves accountable for the thoughts we have and the actions we take.

We all hold a moral code and as we go about our daily lives, we either uphold that code or deny it. It might be in how you choose to communicate with others, what kind of actions you consider toxic, how you support friends and families etc. If you deny yourself the accuracy of upholding your code then you are creating seeds of doubt inside your mind. These seeds have an opportunity to grow into further painful experiences and we can accidentally nurture them through our ignorance and become someone we never intended on becoming.

The “Train of Pain” is a simple notion to help disarm your negative belief habits when someone steps into your space and attempts to cause you trouble. Each of us used to be a child and somewhere along the line that person chose to take the pain another person was dishing out, hold onto it, and pass it over to another person. They inevitably carried the train of pain along with them. Each of us has the opportunity to show love and compassion to the people that wish to cause us harm, and hopefully, if you can do this, you will end that person's pain train.

You can see this all around you and inside you. Someone says something rude to you, cuts you off in traffic, acts incorrectly towards you, and instead of showing that person love, instead of accepting their actions and not taking them personally, you decide to say fuck you and hurl an insult back at them. Nice job, well done. It is akin to a bunch of monkeys throwing shit at each other from the treetops.

What we all need to realize is that this is truly just our dirty laundry coming to the surface. Those that have dealt correctly and diligently with cleaning out the old clothes of the past will have a different reaction when trouble comes their way and in turn, they have the ability at that moment to give someone a gift. A gift of kindness, a breaking of the chain.

Choose to show love, compassion, and gratitude instead of allowing another person's ‘Train of Pain’ to become your own and you will be choosing to leave this world a better place than when you entered it.