fear

A Life Unlived

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

When my father got sick we almost lost the house. I was just getting out of high school and I had never seen my parents to stressed. They’d never fought, now they were fighting all the time. I was too young to understand the tension of a mortgage back then, but with my brothers and sisters already moved out and living in different cities, it was up to me to help.

Unfortunately the only thing I knew that could make me money fast was to work with my brother’s friends. They dealt drugs and wasted it all on fancy cars and stupid stuff. I paid my Dad’s medical bills and my parents kept their house. Still, the money solved my problem but that’s not who my parents raised me to be and I always worried about the people buying the stuff, so to get away from that stress I took night school and eventually I got an engineering degree.

My eventual engineering job replaced the money I was making and we got my parent’s house paid off. Now I was free, but I didn’t know what to do. I’d been trained to be afraid that there’d never be enough money, or there’d always be too much work and that was was bad training for what would come next. That’s when I started talking to Scot and he pointed out that I’d always been responsible–in a whatever way that made sense at the time. That made me feel a bit better.

I had this invention. No big thing, but it was a good idea that could easily replace a good wage. I’d been laid off, so I had the time to develop it, but being laid off had a weird effect. My parent’s situation had taught me to be paranoid about money, so despite having a lot of savings I still worried about money all the time because no more was coming in. It wasn’t a healthy mental situation. And it was ironically keeping me from developing the idea.

Scott had been explaining to me how I’d been accidentally taught to process the world. I saw it as a place that was lacking, that was short, that my life needed work to come from others before it could be secure. I learned to over-process my fears and under-process my dreams. I spent far more time thinking about what could go wrong than what could go right.

Keep in mind during all of this that Scott kept pointing out that I’d done very well in school, and that even my ability to save for meaningful things was businesslike, and that the idea I’d developed was not only good, but the tons of research I’d done on it was not only excellent and thorough, but it represented more proof than most good ideas had to support them when they proceeded. He kept asking me what it was that was holding me back.

For a long time I listed what I thought was holding me back. What if it didn’t work? What if I made some fatal judgment error and ruined a good idea? What if there was a hidden pitfall I couldn’t predict? And what about all of the mistakes in life I’d already made? I had a huge list of fears but Scott just kept reminding me that they were all made of my own thinking. I thought he got what I meant until one day I had a huge revelation.

I was out walking. Okay, I was out procrastinating. If I wasn’t walking then I’d have to work on my idea, and if I did that then I was getting closer to a thing that scared me, so it did make a kind of sense that I was avoiding it. But avoiding it to do what? And that’s when it hit me.

It was so subtle I hope it even comes across now but, I realised that I was avoiding the pursuit of the idea so that I could instead think the fears that might possibly relate to the idea. For the first time I saw my thinking as an action–as what I was doing with my life. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was using my fears about being responsible to keep me from my responsibility to live.

My idea was good. The world would benefit from it. So who was I to keep it from the world because I was busy thinking thoughts that were irrelevant to everyone else? And why would I use the energy from my life to think those destructive thoughts when I could be using the same life energy to build that business?

The fact is, all of this worrying has been me failing. Even if I built the business and it bombed, I would have been done by now and I would have had the advantage of the experience and I would have felt like I accomplished more. Suddenly thinking appeared to me as the opposite of living.

Don’t be like me. Don’t avoid life. Because now that I can see through my thinking, I realise that like the walk, it’s a form of procrastination too. And it requires me to see myself as weak and ineffectual, as though I can’t pull this off. There’s no evidence I can’t do it. Just my fears. And those are no where but my consciousness. So now I hear myself think them and I get why they’re there, but they don’t stop me anymore.

I’ve come alive. I’ve stopped thinking about a timid life and I’ve started living a bold one and it turns out that boldness feels a lot calmer and more peaceful than all that worrying ever did. Listen to Scott. Trade your thinking for living. It makes all the difference in the world.

Sincerely, C

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

Chore Procrastination

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Most of us know the feeling. Your housework has been there for two weeks but you have been a master procrastinator. But if someone’s coming over, suddenly the procrastination is gone and your housework becomes the most important thing in your world. This shift in your values points to an important piece of information.

You started off fine that your house wasn’t picture perfect. Then suddenly someone else was going to see it, and now your place suddenly didn’t look good enough. For this person you will leap to cleaning your space, but for yourself… nah. So what’s going on there? What’s your brain doing? Because half the time the person coming over can be a stranger you’ll see once in your life, like a repairman.

You’re worried about being judged. Maybe about how clean you are, how organised, how much money you have, whatever. There’s something that you know about yourself that you’re trying to hide from others. That shame isn’t good for you. My mother used to wash walls every other week. Then she hit menopause. Boom, we had a freezing house and Mom was no longer interested in sheet-ironing. And as her kids we thought it was great. It seemed like her priorities had improved.

Sometimes you just want your externals to reflect how you feel inside. It makes a very clear kind of sense that when you’re trying to get your life in order, you’ll start with getting your space in order. Those natural impulses are all fine. But the fearful egocentric ones–the ones where you’re worried about belonging–those are unnecessary. You live inside belonging. What some individual human feels about you is relatively nothing. You are loved by the universe.

That can sound corny right? I don’t need to clean my house because the universe loves me? But it’s true. I don’t mean there’s some persona called the universe that loves specifically you, I mean that the universe is a very loving and supportive place if you go to the right places within it. But it’s our job to go where the oasis is. It’s easy to find. It feels like love.

There are people who know you well enough that they’ve seen your house in disarray. They’re still your friends, and you still manage to stay relaxed while they’re over and the place is a disaster. Okay, that’s more like an unconditional relationship. They’ve seen your messy, they’ve seen your neat, and both are fine by them. That’s someone who loves you as a verb. Anyone who judges your space is merely speaking innocently from their ego.

Relax. Be yourself. All of you. Sure, people will judge the real you. But they’re already judging this performance-you anyway, so what’s the difference? You may as well pay to be you as pay to be someone else.

The universe has some suffering built into the deal, but there’s no reason we have to invite more by worrying about other’s judgments. If people aren’t prepared to accept the real us then they’re not interested in an authentic relationship. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them, they’re just finding their way like we all are. But if we are being judged, we’re wiser to invest ourselves in the parts of the universe that love us back.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

Pick Your Poison

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When we’re looking for change we almost always want major change. We want some big part of our life to be different, or rather to give us cause to feel differently about it. But when talking about the change of all changes, the shift is very subtle and the effect very simple. What is remarkable is how profound such a small change can be.

The other day on the radio I heard a woman talk about a blog she had written under a false identity. The perspective she wrote from was strong and capable and she had a voice. The woman then lamented that she wished she personally could live her life more in alignment with her character than the person she was choosing to be.

Imagine that. She created that person and lived that person’s reality when she wrote the blog, and she could feel the joy associated with that person’s freedom, and yet she would say that she is someone else. She would tell us that she isn’t strong like her character. And someone like me would think that was bizarre. Why suffer being someone you don’t like when you know who it feels truly good to be?

Picking poisons. That’s all it is. We all re-create situations because we have coping skills that emerged from our experiences. We prefer the situations that match our skills and we feel uncomfortable being in ones that don’t match. But being good at being an ego is like being good at punching yourself in the face. You don’t want the life that you know, you want the want the one that feels good to live.

By choosing a life that the blog writer found stifling; one where she surrendered opportunities too quickly and failed to gain her own self-respect, she was doubling down on her lack of belief in herself. And yet there’s the person she wants to be, contained within her, writing to the world every day. If she would be willing to learn that person’s life skills she could step into the life that excites her spirit. But instead she stays safe and misses out.

You’re ego’s right. There will be people that will stop liking you if you change. If someone used to complain with you all the time and you don’t want to complain anymore, they’ll feel like you’ve changed for the worse. But while you lose those people, you find others, because the real matches to you can now see and recognise you for who you really are.

Seek a safe, encouraging, supportive environment with no violence or abuse and then find your nature. Because if fear or control take your ego over, you will live a life that is a thin shadow of an existence. But if if you are willing to accept the consequences of being the person that it feels truly good to be, then you will experience life’s challenges as that strong person. And that is much more rewarding than volunteering to be someone less capable and confident; someone who repetitively suffers through familiar problems.

It’s all just self-identity thoughts. The strong ones don’t use more energy than the weak ones. They’re not harder to  have. So be strong. It’s allowed. The crap was always going to come anyway. If you can’t avoid that then you might as well accept it and be who it’s most enjoyable to be.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

The Late Post

Scott McPhersonLeave a comment

Writing about concepts like delay and malfunction seems very appropriate when working around a technical glitch that translates to today’s planned post being unavailable. This is exactly the sort of time a lot of people would experience panic, worry, frustration and anger, so it’s worthwhile discussing my own real-time “management” of those challenges.

First off, people aren’t horribly lost if they do feel one of those unpleasant ways. There is no horribly lost or totally found any more than there is a little love or lot of love. There’s only two states made of one state. So even not-love is made from unconditional love, just as frustration depends on expectation, and just as the black words I am writing to you depend on the white background of this page to be seen. Without that duality creation could not perform its own existence.

Since there are only two states, then you are always only one switch away from the peace or health or confidence you seek. But if you’re seeking then you’re not finding, and those work just like every other duality. You can’t look for something and find it at the same time, either one or the other is happening. In fact, it’s often when we relax and stop looking so hard for answers that they actually occur to us spontaneously. So when you’re lost, you’re not looking for some big solution. You just need one little switch. And you’ll notice it, not figure it out.

At first people tend to get their egos to do this, so as a teacher I’ll cooperate with that. It’s the act the of dropping-away of illusions. You have to do a few at a time. So at the start you’ll calm yourself down by using your ego consciously, but getting it to say more positive things to you. It’s really a translation process where the fear hits, the anger starts to form, you feel it and then retranslate it into a slow breath in and out and a ego-based self-discussion about how anger won’t do you any good.

Eventually you get to the point where you’ve had so many of those diffusions and derailments that you’re bored of the process. You go to begin it and your brain sort of surrenders, knowing that the outcome always leads to the same result. It’s a natural reaction of your mind to want to take the proven shortcut and then just let go. There’s no act of conversion now because our unwillingness to participate in the illusion suddenly exposes the nuances of present reality to us.

Instead of our minds filled with our thoughts about some part of the world, our minds are filled with the whole world unjudged. It’s just there, and we simply are, and there is no shoulds, so no one can go wrong and no one can go right. You just go. Otherwise known as living. Unhealthy people talk themselves into an emotion, and healthy people go quiet and they dive into their feelings.

I could have played ping pong with my egos word-based thoughts today. But instead I just did what needed to be done and then I sat down at a blank page and I summoned the same feeling I use to write to you every time. There was no rushed thoughts or ideas that things had gone wrong, nor was there any storytelling about how that might secretly be better in some unexpected way. I just felt that feeling as my activity and this post emerged quite naturally as a result.

Living that way is all you’re looking for. It’s all people read this blog and take my classes for. They just want to stop all of that agonised waffling and just be what they’re gonna be instead. Your ego can ask questions about who you’re supposed to be, but you can only really be you in the present reality, so those questions about what you’re supposed to do are in fact the very action you are involved in that prevents you from realising the reality that is before you every moment.

Don’t let changes in direction throw your psychology around. Your mood is the result of the patterns you initiate and continue to energise through your internal language and analysis. What’s happening isn’t nearly as important as whether or not you’re willing to be okay with whatever that happening is. So don’t try to get healthy. Just try to be okay with how things are.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organizations locally and around the world.

The Universal Playground

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1029-relax-and-succeed-life-isnt-as-seriousYou feel like you’re in some hostile place where you have to constantly prove yourself while simultaneously battling a never-ending series of problems but; what if you were looking at it from the wrong angle? A cube can look like a two-dimensional square from six different perspectives and yet that doesn’t make it a square to some perspectives but it will absolutely and honestly be a square to those six perspectives. Other views have other views.

What dimensionalises things is when you flip the universe from a place hostile, (where you’re not good enough to overcome all of your problems), to a generous place (where you start off belonging and the universe is keen to cooperate with your creativity). But if your perspective is that you can’t be happy until you’re in Los Angeles, or until you’re with that certain person, or until you own this or that; then the world will always feel wanting.

1029-relax-and-succeed-no-im-not-being-immatureThink of the angle of a pinball machine as your nature. Without anything in your way, you’ll just naturally head that direction until you die and you’ll be quite graceful about it. But life includes all of those things you can hit along the way. Bang, smack, poke, there’s bells, chimes and sirens and the sudden, unexpected direction changes has the whole mess going all over the place. It can feel like you just move from one impact to another. But…

…but I never said you were the ball. If you related to all of those problems and impacts to yourself then you thought you were the ball but the ball is only your ego. You are the player. And the player has a perspective the ball does not. By having a higher perspective your soul realises that all of those impacts aren’t bad things. Those are actually where you’re gaining all of your points; your experience points.

The other thing you’d notice as the player and not the ball would be that the impacts are all to the ball and not the player. You’d also notice that some of the hardest impacts your ego felt weren’t from bumps of beneficial experience, but rather from your soul actively redirecting you, thereby preventing you from going down the hole. So your ego feels like it’s being battered and yet the player is doing all he can to keep you alive, and it’s all just a great big bunch of bouncing and noise until then.

1029-relax-and-succeed-the-most-dangerous-thingWhen you die the player simply runs out of balls and leaves the machine, so the ball will never get to see its own score so that’s not a reason to play. The player can see the score, but the wisest, happiest players are those that know that to play to win is to live and die as the ball. To be truly alive is to enjoy the playing of the game itself, and so they’ve learned to ignore any scores. If you’re a player you just move to the next game.

Too many people stare endlessly at the machine, fearful to release even the first ball, always imagining failure. But there is no losing in the game of life. The playing itself is the victory. Life is crazy. And it’s good. It’s always been able to be both. So just accept today’s craziness and play your game and I’ll watch for you out on the playing field of life.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.

Anxiousness vs Authenticity

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You feel uncertain and anxious but it’s not your fault. You are however the only one that can get you out of that trap, but to do that you don’t need to change yourself, you just have to recognise that the only reason you feel uncertain is because long before you, humans created language and we used words to assemble ideas of right and wrong (as opposed to what we personally preferred). For the first time there was a way for a human being to be unacceptable.

In school you were taught this correct thing and that correct thing and you got big red X’s for anything that wasn’t correct. The problem is, later in life it turns out those same educational experiences taught you to always look for answers outside of yourself. A line was drawn between you and your natural wisdom. You were inadvertently taught to seek external approval, meaning you literally, subconsciously learned not to trust yourself, like a mechanic trusting a computerised scanner over something obvious to their own eyes and ears.

So here’s your lifelong problem; you spend your whole life searching for the parts that will make up a healthy you when you were whole right right the start. Yes you might need to add to some knowledge to do some specific thing, but after that you have to trust yourself in life. It’s like that trust exercise where one person falls backward, counting on the person behind them to catch them? This is like that except you’re both people. You need to trust you. You just also have to remember that sometimes even the catching part of you also falls. It just goes like that sometimes. For everyone.

1027-relax-and-succeed-stop-trying-to-fit-inYour life isn’t over. It hasn’t even started. Understand that the world still has a lot of cool directions to go. That’s all highly acclaimed art and science are; it’s art that not only was fantastic from a craftsmanship perspective, it’s the stuff that is more like a philosophical treatise, like when Picasso created cubism. Most breakthrough science entails uncovering new knowledge that couldn’t possibly have been learned by looking at what already existed. We must have faith in the infinite nature of the universe. Trust me, if you had a better appreciation for how vast it is you’d feel more comfortable with the idea that it has enough space even for you to be a genius.

What’s you being your own genius look like? I dunno, maybe you’re a working mother who deeply would rather stay home and raise your kids like you were raised, but you and your husband need the money for the mortgage, plus if you’re not working then other women will think you’ve lost your mojo or something. But think about it: these are your kids and they’re only kids a short time. Better you shape a tree when it’s young. It’s not crazy to prioritise family over work, but how brave have you been about making something work?

Can your ego accept a smaller house and the lower payments that would allow you to be a stay-at-home mom? Could you trade the joy of what feels natural and the upsides to your kids for whatever thought-based reputation you have among your friends and co-workers? Is what anyone thinks of your decisions really important when those judgments only remain place in the conscious of often unimportant people for a short time?

You can afford to be braver. We all have plenty of headroom in that regard. But you can’t second-guess yourself using egocentric, word-based thought because if you’re scared you’ll always be able to rationalise your decision not to take action. You are not that voice. That voice is just something you do instead of taking action.

As I’ve written about before, there’s a guy whose ultra-religious family lead him to rebel by creating super creepy art featuring blood and skulls and snakes and things and he’s rich and lives in a castle and has superstar clients. What would you have done if that’s what you wanted to do? Surely you have an easier calling being a stay-at-home mom, or whatever your authentic choice yours is. Just don’t expect to live in a castle, because that’s not the point. The point is that he’s happy with his life and he does what moves him and somehow that either works out to be wonderful or it’s some kind of valuable lesson. Either way you win.

Stop worrying and create more original living in your life. You don’t have to read the right book or take the right class or meet the right person or get the right job; you just have to be yourself and your place in the world will be known. And then wherever you are you’ll always feel comfortable because you’ll always be comfortable with yourself.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.

Pronoia

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Winner: 2016’s Blog of the Year

1007-relax-and-succeed-pronoiaHere’s what I don’t get: why is there an it’s too good to be true, but not an, it’s too bad to be true? When the crime rate’s gone down steadily for over 3o years, when tons of people volunteered to go into helping professions, when such a tiny percentage of the population ever gets in trouble; why are we so quick to assume the worst? And yet look how the people in this video assume good things are automatically suspicious:

People want the world to be better and yet they’ll actively engage in this kind of paranoia. There is no reason you couldn’t look a stranger in the eye as you walked past them on a street because your odds of getting a scowl would be very low and your odds of a smile would be very good (almost 100% if you go first), and if you do miss that positive experience it’ll probably be because the other person is still looking down, assuming that you’ll be a bad experience.

There are marginal excuses for these unhealthy, disconnecting behaviours. If you’ve been traumatised then it can be possible to find yourself unrealistically but validly hyper-concerned, but for the average person that jaundiced view of humanity is completely unjustified. 98% of people we’ll meet in a day treat us nicely, and we ourselves spend time in that other 2% so we’d best not throw stones.

If you’re watching closely you see evidence of this goodness every day. Giving money to the homeless means someone is volunteering to be poorer with no gain to themselves except the good feelings that come from that sort of compassion. Friends write supportive messages, people make positive social media posts, within every bad news story there will be heroes. People are polite, they tell jokes, they go outside the bounds of their job to help you for no gain to themselves. It’s everywhere.

1007-relax-and-succeed-good-people-bring-out-the-goodPolice risk their lives to protect people. Firefighters run into burning buildings to save strangers. Doctors risk losing a patient to save them. People give blood. They run and walk and cycle countless miles for countless charities. They hold doors for you, they give you compliments, or maybe even just a smile. People are overwhelmingly good, even if they’re not always doing what you want them to.

How can you benefit by thinking the worst of others? You’re doing the thinking. That’s happening inside your head, and it’s your body that’s experiencing the negative reaction that comes from negative thinking. The person you’re thinking about probably doesn’t even care. They might be busy, happily smiling while you’re thinking your dark, suspicious thoughts.

May I suggest that your life would improve the moment you adopted a new paradigm? Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia. Rather than thinking that the world is conspiring against you, you think that it’s conspiring in your favour. Instead of mistrusting someone because you think they’re going to do something behind your back, trust them and stay open to the idea that they might reward you unexpectedly. Or you have some big project fall through, instead of feeling like a failure, you can instead happily assume it’s because you’ll need the time and resources for something even better!

1007-relax-and-succeed-you-must-not-lose-faithPeople who scowl a lot will tell you that pronoics are silly and unrealistic but those scowling people also live inside their beliefs–beliefs which suggest that optimistic, trusting, positive views are less likely than pessimistic, untrustworthy and negative ones. But they’re scowling; and for every one of them I could introduce you to some extremely successful person and they will talk about how they can’t believe how lucky they’ve been.

You can go through life watching for bad things and I assure you you will find them just as day turns to night. At the same time, if you go through life watching for good things then I assure you, you will not only see them during the daytime; they’ll glow like stars at night.

You’re a good person. The people walking toward you have every reason to assume that. And they’re just like you. So going forward let’s all try offering more help, accepting more help, and just in general let’s get off our phones and get back to each other. Because when it comes to improving society and connecting with people in the moment you’re in, there’s simply no app for that. So go practice some pronoia. And trust me, if you’re paying attention you’ll quickly notice that you are not alone.

peace. s

Scott McPherson is an Edmonton-based writer, public speaker, and mindfulness facilitator who works with individuals, companies and non-profit organisations locally and around the world.