My Trip from Hell

If it turns out there really is a hell, I think it will look a lot like the life I was living about 15 years ago.  Fortunately, I don't live there any more.

I have successfully transformed over the past 15 years or so as the result of doing mindset work. I struggled with jobs, with relationships, with parenting, with money, with self-esteem, with faith, with judgment and mostly with fear. My opinion of myself was dependent upon the opinion of those closest to me. 15 years ago I was a mess. I had already been sober and clean for 20 years at that time. But was recently divorced and in a new career as a mortgage loan officer.

I blamed myself and I blamed my second wife for my unhappiness.   I was searching for some way to feel better, to get some relief.  I didn’t consider drinking again.  I was re-engaged with my recovery program but found it lacking.  I had begun to attempt a meditation practice but couldn’t sit still.  Paying that much attention to my thoughts was driving up the anxiety.

I think it was about this time of the year in 2002 that my friend, Allen and I drove over to Seattle to check out Byron Katie at the Unity Church.   It was a profound turning point in my life.  Literally overnight, “The Work” caught fire inside of me.   I realized I had been believing every thought without question.  I had been reacting to every thought as if it were true.  No wonder I had been so hot and cold, up and down.   No wonder I blamed, felt like a victim and had no power in my life.

I struggled for a while with the idea that my judgments were causing my suffering.  I could certainly see that my suffering was making it nearly impossible to find success and happiness in life.  But I was pretty attached to my stories about why I suffered.  I was convinced – it seemed so apparent – that my suffering was directly a result of the circumstances in my life.

Slowly, I loosened my grip on that story and as I did, I began to accept that it wasn’t what was happening in my life that caused me to suffer.  It was what I thought about what was happening in my life that determined what I felt and how I reacted to life.  I began to see that I was reacting to my own perspective.

I had always resisted “positive thinking” as phony, inauthentic.  At least I was real, I would proudly think. Not like those phony people.  Soon I saw that The Work; questioning my thinking, was not about painting over rust.  I experienced an opening as I disarmed thoughts that had never been questioned.  And in that opening I found clarity, peace, power and access to wisdom.

Simply by using my own suffering as the cue to do The Work, I began to transform.  I began to see what I had never seen.  I started accepting responsibility for how I felt, what I did, and for the results I had been creating.

This transformation has not been a straight line from hell to heaven.  There have been setbacks.  For a long time, I easily fell under the spell of believing circumstances had to change to accommodate me.  It can still happen.  I still want to play victim.  I still want to indulge in the delusion that I have no power and that life is happening to me.  As strange as it seems. I still want to suffer sometimes.

And life is not heaven now but it certainly isn’t the hell that it was 15 years ago.  I have successfully transformed.  I barely recognize myself.  I get to do what I want to do.   I love what I have, I love who I am, I love who and what is in my life and am willing, when I don’t love what is, to do my work.