Nothing Changes Until You Do: A Guide to Self-Compassion and Getting Out of Your Own Way (21 page)

I said, “Dan, as excited and passionate as I am about the idea of helping and inspiring people, every time I think about speaking or writing, I worry that all my ideas are recycled from someone or somewhere else. I’m not sure I have any original ideas.”

Dan said, “Mike, don’t worry, everyone feels like that, especially when they’re just starting out. It’s my belief that there’s only one light but many lamps. Your job is to simply shine your light as bright as possible, and trust that the people you are supposed to reach will resonate with you.” I was grateful for the simplicity and wisdom of Dan’s feedback, and I took it to heart.

Shining our light is something most of us want to do in life, but sometimes it can be a little tricky. As Marianne Williamson famously says in her book
A Return to Love
, “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” As much as we want to “shine,” we often don’t allow ourselves to do so, either because we don’t think we deserve to or because we don’t know how to handle it when we do. For many of us, it’s much easier to struggle and suffer than it is to shine.

How about you? How do you feel when things go well for you? Are you comfortable shining? If you’re anything like me, you may have some mixed feelings about it, as odd as that seems. While I do love it when things go well, I also notice that sometimes it poses certain challenges for me.

When things go really well in my life, as much as I appreciate and enjoy it, I also find myself feeling uncomfortable at the same time. Why is this? For me—and for many other folks—there are a few main reasons, as I noted in the earlier chapter, “Allow Things to Be Easy.”

First, we may hear that voice in our head that says,
It’s too good to be true
, or
It won’t last
, or
You’ll mess it up
. This, of course, is one of the sneaky ways our gremlin tries to rob us of our power and joy. Our gremlin convinces us not to shine too brightly, because if we do, we will have farther to fall when we fail.

Second, we worry that people won’t like us, will judge us, or will get jealous of our success, power, or happiness, and thus pull away from us. Connected to this feeling of separation, we may also find ourselves worrying that if things go too well, people won’t be able to relate to us. We may have picked up some of these beliefs in childhood or adolescence—from siblings, friends, or other kids in school. Many of us grew up in environments where we were constantly competing with and being compared to the people close to us. And, as much as we may have wanted to stand out, we also may have learned the hard way that there can be negative consequences for shining too brightly.

Third, much of our learning, growth, and evolution in life has come through pain and suffering. Even though we may have heard a number of teachers and mentors say that we can grow more effectively and elegantly through joy and love, sometimes we find ourselves worrying that if things get too good, we’ll get lazy. We’ll stop actively learning or somehow abandon our journey of personal growth.

Finally, we sometimes don’t feel worthy of our success. It’s as though we take our gifts, talents, and successes for granted, choosing to focus on all of the areas we think we need to improve, and in the process discount ourselves.

These and other limiting thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs have gotten in my way in the past. They’ve kept me stuck in difficult situations, or, at the very least, have limited my experience of joy and fulfillment. It’s almost as if I’ve been more comfortable suffering than I have been when things were going well. When there are problems to deal with, I’m able to dig down deep, access my power, and rise up to meet them.

Your version of this may look a little different from mine, but lots of people I know and work with, even those who have created a lot of outward “success” in their lives, seem to struggle to some degree with allowing themselves to shine.

We all have this ability. We are born with it but somehow unlearn it as we grow. One of the most remarkable memories I have was as a brand-new father taking Samantha out in public for the very first time. After we brought her home from the hospital, we kept her in the house for the first few weeks, with the exception of visits to the doctor. She’d been born a little early, and had jaundice (which many babies born early do), and as new parents we were a little on the paranoid side, so we didn’t feel comfortable taking her out in public. After about three weeks, we decided it was time, and, on the way home from the doctor one afternoon, we stopped at the store to pick up a few things.

Samantha was asleep in her car seat. I took her out, wrapped her up in a tight swaddle, and decided to carry her into the store in my arms. I had no idea what was about to occur. We walked through the front door and almost immediately I became the most popular guy there. People came running up to us to see the new baby. You often get a lot of attention when you’re out with a baby, but when you go out with a newborn, it’s even more intense—people are both excited and shocked to see such a tiny human being. I think that’s because even those of us who’ve had babies forget how little they are when they first come out.

What felt like hordes of people came over to see Samantha, to congratulate us, and to whisper to her. They said things like, “Oh, look how beautiful you are,” or “Welcome to Earth,” or “You’re amazing!” They said these things in a hushed tone (because she was asleep), but with such appreciation, authenticity, and reverence that I was stunned!

As we walked out of the store, amazed by what we’d just experienced, I said to Michelle, “That was incredible. But, it’s so interesting that Samantha got all of that attention and appreciation—she didn’t even do anything to deserve it. You’re the one who carried her for all those months and gave birth to her, but no one even said anything about that. She just slept in my arms … and did nothing.”

Even if she had been awake, Samantha, as a new baby, would probably not have consciously known what people were saying to her and about her, but she most likely would have been able to feel it, and would not have had any resistance to receiving that appreciation and attention. Unfortunately, as we get older, we pick up certain ideas and beliefs about what we deserve and don’t deserve. Many of us learn, sadly, to dim our light based on our own fear or judgment (or that of those around us). But Samantha just lay there and let her light shine.

We don’t have to dim our light. As Marianne Williamson also says later in that same famous passage from
A Return to Love
, “There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.” As we get more in touch with who we really are and let go of our fear of what other people think of us, we give ourselves permission to let our light shine brightly. And, when we do this, it can liberate us and inspire others.

CHAPTER 40

Live Like You’re Going to Die (Because You Are)

On Friday, March 11, 2011, I picked up my mom at her house and we drove to the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in downtown Oakland for the second time that week. The previous Friday, my mom had called me early in the morning to say she’d had a rough night of sleep because her back was really bothering her. I encouraged her to go get it checked out, and she’d gone in for an exam and an X-ray. The X-ray showed a spot on her lung, so they asked her to come back the following Monday for a CT scan. This Friday appointment was to follow up and get the results from the scan.

My mom, my sister Lori, and I had spent a lot of time together at Kaiser over the past year, as my mom had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer the previous spring. She’d had two surgeries as well as radiation treatment that she’d just recently completed. The surgeries and treatment had been successful, and my mom was declared cancer-free. Her breast cancer ordeal had been quite scary and stressful for everyone. The doctor we were scheduled to meet with that Friday was the same oncologist she’d been seeing for the past year.

He walked into the room with an intensely somber look on his face and didn’t make eye contact with us (although that was pretty normal for him). After a moment, he sat down and then said, “I’m sorry, Lois. I have some very bad news. Your CT scan has confirmed what we feared when we saw your X-ray. You have stage four lung cancer.” The blood in my body turned ice-cold. I looked at my mom. I could see the terror and disbelief on her face. I moved across the room to where she was sitting and grabbed her hand. Neither of us said anything, nor did the doctor. The three of us just sat there in silence as his words hung in the air. I finally was able to utter, “What does this mean exactly?” He said, “Well, as you know, stage four is the most advanced. It looks as though the disease has spread significantly and aggressively. Unfortunately, there aren’t many medical options. We won’t be able to operate. You can choose to pursue treatment options like chemotherapy and radiation, but with your advanced disease, we’re not sure if the benefits of that outweigh the costs. That’s a choice you’ll have to make in the coming days; it really comes down to a quality-of-life issue.” After another long pause, my mom asked, in a bit of a hushed tone, “How much time do you think I have?”

“Well,” he said, “based on the advanced nature of your disease, it’s hard to say for sure. On average with stage four lung cancer, we’re looking at a year, possibly less.” There really wasn’t much else to say or ask at that point. After another long and intense period of silence, the doctor got up, shook my hand, patted my mom on the shoulder, and said, “I’m very sorry, Lois.” I think he said a few other things after that—instructions about the next appointment or something. Quite frankly, I really don’t remember; it was all a bit of a blur. When he walked out of the room, however, my mom collapsed into my arms, sobbing. While I’d seen my mother cry a number of times throughout my life, although it wasn’t common, this, of course, was still like nothing I’d ever experienced. Not even her breast cancer diagnosis brought on this kind of emotion. This diagnosis felt different and final; she’d just been told she was going to die.

A few weeks later as the reality of the situation had set in and my mom began to get quite sick, I was on a run one morning and thought,
I wonder what it’s like to be my mom right now, knowing she’s going to die.
As soon as I had that thought, I literally stopped running and then thought,
Wait a minute, I know I’m going to die, too—I just don’t know when.

As simple as this thought was, it was profound for me. I don’t live my life all that consciously aware of my own death—even though I know it’s inevitable. My own fears about death—my own and the deaths of people close to me—often force me to avoid thinking about it altogether. I do catch myself worrying about dying, sometimes more often than I’d like to admit, especially with our girls being as young as they are and given how many people close to me have died in the past decade or so.

I also hesitate to talk about death because it seems like such a morbid topic, a real downer. I worry that it’s too intense to address, or I superstitiously fear that if I focus on death I will somehow attract it to me or to those around me.

As a culture, we don’t really talk about death or deal with it in a meaningful way since it can be quite scary, emotional, and painful. Death also seems like the exact opposite of so much of what we do obsess about—youth, productivity, vitality, results, beauty, improvement, the future, and so on.

But what if we embraced death, talked about it more, and shared our own thoughts, feelings, and questions about it? While for some of us this may seem uncomfortable, undesirable, or even a little weird, think how liberating it would be to face the reality of death directly.

Steve Jobs gave a powerful and famous commencement speech at Stanford’s graduation in 2005 entitled “How to Live Before You Die.” In that speech, which now has even more poignancy given that he has passed away, Steve said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Contemplating death in a conscious way doesn’t have to freak us out. Knowing that our human experience is limited and that at some mysterious point in the future our physical body will die is both sobering and liberating.

The reason I’ve always appreciated memorial services—even when I’ve been in deep pain and grief over the death of someone close to me—is because there is a powerful consciousness that often surrounds death. When someone passes away, we feel more like we have permission to get real and be vulnerable, so we can focus on what’s most important (not the ego-based fear, comparison, and self-criticism that often run our lives).

What if we tapped into this empowering awareness all the time—not just because someone close to us dies or because we have our own near-death experience? What if we instead choose to affirm life and appreciate the blessings, gifts, and opportunities that it provides? As I heard in a great workshop I took years ago, “Most of you are trying to survive life; you have to remember that no one ever has.”

My mom’s illness and her death, just three months after diagnosis, were painful but powerful reminders of the precious and temporary nature of human life. There are reminders of this everywhere; we just often choose to avoid them, deny them, or worry about them—instead of embracing them.

I decided to end the book with this chapter on living like you’re going to die for a few reasons. First of all, it brings things back full circle to the first chapter, “Focus on What Truly Matters,” in which I talked about both the pain and the beauty of my mom’s death, and all that I learned from her as she was dying. Second of all, the awareness and perspective we often gain in the face of death is directly related to the core themes of this book—go for it, be yourself, accept who you are, be gentle with yourself, have the courage to be vulnerable, love yourself, remember that you are the source of your own happiness, and practice completely embracing and surrendering to the present moment.