Years ago, I was introduced to Byron Katie's book, Loving What Is and The Work. It was mind and soul expanding. I'd heard over and over that I had control over my thoughts and emotions, and knew at some level that was true...but.
The Work taught me how to question my thoughts and that I could question every single one of them. AND it gave me a framework for doing that; flipping them around, and seeing the real truth within myself. I still often do the turnaround without the questions because that's where the great stuff is. What *I* am really thinking which allows me to change it.
I ask myself, Is that true? How can I know that is true? How do I react when I believe that thought? Who would I be without that thought? In the questioning and the new thinking, is freedom.
Somewhere in learning about Loving What Is, I met Leslie Householder and started diving in to everything she had. Much of what she teaches, came from sources I had already read, and had even done some significant work with mentor and friend Rebecca Fine who taught me to "expect success" and to stay in my own business.
Leslie expanded my previous knowledge and helped me see the mechanisms and solutions to the programs that run me, where they come from, how to change them, how to ask questions and get answers. And how to trust those answers and create a vibrant thriving life. I get to decide what that looks like.
Last year, my friend Caroline Skrdla invited me to attend a program called Landmark. Once again, new work, discoveries, and ideas nudged me forward in my understanding of myself and others. I saw miracles you cannot imagine in people's suffering over four days, that I didn't think was possible. A Cambodian woman who became my friend in the months after, of really working to get the ideas implemented into our lives, dropped her victimhood and her story around living and surviving her childhood during the killing fields. A nine year old, abandoned and left to tend her two younger siblings through months of deprivation and starvation, in one weekend, simply walked away from the terror and suffering of her thoughts and experiences.
I learned a little extra piece at Landmark that was and still is hard sometimes for me to accept, but only because I let it be hard. Loving what ISN'T. It's a fine line between loving what is to love what isn't. Example: loving my mother how she is and isn't. How she is? In heaven right now. How she isn't; or maybe wasn't? Not in my life much from the time I was five and gone by her own hand by the time I was nineteen. Not here to be my mom or grandma to my children. (Funny how that can be written in a single sentence and represent SO MUCH emotion and time)!
I know! I hear the question...BUT...you cannot imagine how many buts I've bounced off my sister friend Cari. But, how can you love that your mother wasn't there and that she committed suicide? How can you love those things?
What are my options? Not loving it causes my suffering. And I don't want to suffer. I wrestle with other ideas that bring me suffering until I let go of my firm grip on them and accept. Freedom.
If Victor Frankl could come out of the horrors of the holocaust still reasoning, that he had choice, and there was a space where he could make that choice and choose his attitude in ANY circumstance, what can we do? What can you do? How can we look newly at viruses, and riots, and political parties, and our neighbors and family members and what we THINK about them? Will we do what it takes for freedom? Not the general freedom that I believe most Americans seek after, but the freedom that allows a daughter without a mother, a black woman, a Cambodian girl, a Jewish man, and hundreds and thousands of others, and YOU right now in what you are suffering, to be REALLY free.
See, I have to admit that growing up in the world without a mother, and one who took her life, ISN'T the worst thing that could happen. I don't want to know what the worst thing in the world is. What I DO want to know, is how can I choose today, in the circumstances that I am tempted to suffer in; how can I choose differently? By choosing differently. By thinking differently. There are many other things in my life, I could choose to be a victim over, but my life had a lot of happiness, even with the "bad." It's because of how bad things WERE, that I can appreciate how GOOD things can be and are!
One of my friends who is wrestling her thoughts into new creations, shared an idea with me this morning. Here is how I ended up internalizing what she shared. The "Mormon" pioneers are some of the greatest examples in history that I know of that loved what was and loved what wasn't.
In the words of our revered hymn...(Just one of four amazing verses)
ALL IS WELL (verse 3)
Why should we mourn or think our lot is hard?
'Tis not so; all is right.
Why should we think to earn a great reward
If we now shun the fight?
Gird up your loins; fresh courage take.
Our God will never us forsake;
And soon we’ll have this tale to tell—
All is well! All is well!
Not all WILL BE well, all IS well. They too suffered deprivation, starvation, and suffering at the hands of our own government and mobs with the intention of exterminating them. Yet they sang, ALL IS WELL.
Today, as I awoke, tempted to believe the thoughts that brought me to tears, I chose instead to absolutely know that all is well. As many of us have heard from wise friends and family members over the years, typically grandparents, everything will be all right. The hymn of the early Saints of my faith, improved on that idea that flows through the generations. All is well. I'm standing in the freedom of that thought.
