The Best Lesson Ever!

I’ve been through a lot in my lifetime, and you’ve probably been through a lot of challenging things too. This is just the nature of being a human being who has lived for more than a few years. Life is messy and none of us get through unscathed. We all collect wounds and scar tissue throughout our lives, be they physical or emotional.

In what has been almost the first 50 years of my life, I was bullied, heartbroken, and spent years in unhealthy relationships. I've had panic attacks, I tried to kill myself, I've experienced bouts of depression, and phases of sexual compulsiveness. In this life of mine, things just didn’t happen to me, I also did things that I wasn’t proud of. I broke a lot of hearts, made bad choices, suppressed my emotions, and lived out of integrity for years of my life. And yet through it all, I wouldn’t take any of it back - not for a single second. Because all of those experiences made me who I am today. More on that in a minute, but first, a metaphor for life that I absolutely adore.

The Most Valuable Metaphor For Life Ever - Imagine when you are born, your life is a large but empty room. And every single day, square building blocks miraculously drop down from the sky and get stacked in the exact same place, for all of your days on earth. These building blocks represent the experiences that you go through. Regardless of whether you label them as positive or negative experiences, they are simply experiences. These experiences keep coming at you, whether you feel ready for them or not. While the experiences keep coming, early on in life, the foundation isn’t very solid. In fact, it’s just a single, straight stack of one building block on top of the other.

Every few years, a large earthquake happens and the building blocks come tumbling down in a big messy heap. In practical/real world terms, this earthquake could be a devastating breakup, the loss of a family member, or sexual/emotional/physical abuse in a relationship. These earthquakes are often some event that shakes you to your core and causes deep pain, sadness, shame, or grief. It can feel alarming to go from having been ten building blocks high, to now feeling like you’re starting over from nothing. Your building blocks have scattered and you may feel like you’re back to square one. Which, in a way, is the truth. Yet, without fail, the building blocks keep descending from the sky just as they always have. They never stop, and they keep being placed in the exact same spot.

This pattern carries on. The building blocks stack themselves in one place, and infrequent earthquakes keep happening over the course of your lifetime. Over time, the foundation of the building blocks becomes higher and higher. Eventually, you don’t feel each earthquake as much as you used to. This isn’t to say that you don’t feel the quakes at all, because you absolutely do. You still feel the earthquakes when you’ve been through ten of them, just as you continue to feel the grief of your close friends dying even if you’ve already known other friends and family members who have passed away previously. You don’t become numb to the earthquakes, you just feel stronger and more resilient because your foundation is increasingly wide.

This is life. Experiences keep coming at you. You live them, you feel them, and every now and then, your life gets shaken up by something significant. Everything crumbles to the ground. And yet, over time, it gets easier to deal with because you become more resilient. You can say with confidence “I have felt a pain like this before, and it didn’t break me, so I will get through this as well.”

All Of Your Suffering Was Worth It - No matter what you have been through, it has made you who you are today. It has made you stronger, more resilient, and more able to be a pillar of support for others that you cross paths with. For so many years of my life, I thought that life was just happening to me. I thought that all of my suffering was unnecessary, that the pain I was experiencing was just life being cruel. I eventually came to realize that life wasn’t happening to me, it was happening for me. We can only ever experience true compassion and deep empathy when we have been through something similar to the person we are being an emotional support to. With each life experience that I went through, I was then that much more able to be a supportive healer for every person who was currently suffering in a way similar to what I had gone through. I was able to move from “That sounds awful” to “I’ve been there. I get it. It’s absolutely the worst.” and have it mean that much more.

Seen in this light, all of our suffering is a gift. Your suffering allows you to become:

• More compassionate
• More empathetic
• Less judgmental of others experiences
• More self-aware
• More self-loving and self-compassionate
• More aware of relationships that don’t serve you, and more able to remove yourself from them
• More resilient under pressure

Does suffering automatically allow you to become this way? No. You have to do some healing from the suffering in order to have it turn to compassion, resilience, and self-love. Your pain has to be felt, experienced, and lived through. Buried pain does not turn into compassion and self-love, it turns into judgment, physical tension, illness, anxiety, and depression. Compassion comes from healed pain. Whether it’s immediately apparent or not, your suffering was all worth it, and the gifts that you gleaned from your most traumatic experiences will only become more apparent with time...

How NOT To Be a Fool In Love

It is a fact that falling in love makes otherwise smart and self-respecting people feel and act ridiculous. Whether it is finding pathetic excuses to call again when he does not call back right away, or scheming to run into her outside her office "by accident," I don't know anyone who has not at least once gone a little bit bonkers for new love.

It is not as if you don't at least suspect when it is happening that you are being an idiot, but that doesn't help you because you're tackling your idiocy from the wrong end. You try by the sheer force of will power to purge yourself of your idiotic impulses. This never ever works, which is why despite swearing to yourself and your friends that you are going to play it cool this time, you'll still end up sneaking off for the twentieth time that day to check your messages in the bathroom again. Friend, you need to develop a better approach.

The fact of the matter is, you can't make yourself stop wanting to do dumb things when you've fallen hard for someone any more than you can make yourself stop wanting cheesecake, or a cigarette, or a martini, or anything else that tempts you. Take a moment to let that sink in, because it's really important. I'll wait...

Now, the good news is that you can stop actually doing the things that make you look and feel like an idiot, despite the fact that you really want to do them if you use the right strategy. You can stop the compulsive voicemail and email checking, the constant texting, and the Facebook stalking. You can shut out all those premature thoughts of what your wedding will be like, and what you'll name your children. When you're wondering on your second date if he or she has fallen in love with you yet, you can stop yourself from actually asking them.

The solution begins with embracing the idea that dating is like dieting. Nobody loses weight by deciding they don't want calorie-rich food anymore. You can't talk yourself out of wanting french fries, and if you are solely counting on the sheer force of will power to see you through when you feel tempted, you're going to wind up eating a lot of french fries.

The next step is to do some "if-then" planning. Over a hundred scientific studies on everything from diet and exercise, to curbing spending, to quitting smoking, have shown that deciding in advance how you will handle your impulses will double or triple your chances for success (e.g., "If I am hungry and want a snack, then I will choose a healthier option like fruit or veggies").

The key to a successful plan involves deciding what you will do instead of being the fool. So when you are taken by the desire to try to track him down on Facebook, or to leave the "not sure if you got my last message" message on her voicemail, what more productive and non-creepy behavior will you replace it with?  My mother once giving me some excellent advice about a girlfriend I was obsessing over.  "When you feel like calling her" she said, "then call me." You don't have to call your mother when love messes with your head, but having some sort of plan in place is essential.

"If-then" plans are simple, easy to create, and extraordinarily effective when it comes to resisting temptation, be it edible or otherwise. Just taking a moment to decide in advance how you will handle your less attractive impulses could mean the difference between finding Mr. or Ms. Right, and seriously freaking them out...

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