Regular blog on the concepts of focus and self mastery, published every Tuesday. Visit my website for more info!
The definition of empathy in the Oxford Language dictionary is:
the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
The definition of compassion in the same dictionary is:
sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.
What I want you to notice first and foremost is where the focus is in these two definitions.
There are two types of people. People who are afraid to feel their emotions and people that are afraid of not feeling their emotions. Which camp are you in? Is it possible to find balance between those two camps?
I was in camp “don’t feel anything” for most of my life. Needless to say that it caused a ton of pain. It caused me to have regular mental breakdowns because I was simply unwilling and unable to deal with my emotions in any sort of useful way.
My lessons lately have been fascinating to me, not because they are hard but because they are reflective of some of the very popular spiritual teachings that float around on social media and get spouted by many spiritual teachers. One common one is “stop defending yourself”. Ever heard that one before? You may have even seen me writing or talking about it at some point. But what does that really mean? How do you actually do that? Let me share what I’ve come across the last little while.
I was recording my podcast episode for the week and I had a discovery or a realization in the middle of it. This is the kind of thing that used to happen all the time, but hasn’t happened in a while and so it was fascinating when it did.
One of the things I’ve been writing about in my new book, The Art of Self Mastery, is the idea of having a captive audience. One of my biggest beefs with teaching school children was that they were captive; for the most part they didn’t want to be there. I did not enjoy teaching people that didn’t want to learn what I was teaching.
What’s that thing you keep running away from? Got it in your head? Okay, let’s talk about it.
There are a few stories we like to tell about going after goals, that keep us from moving forward with them. The first one is that we need to have the whole path planned out before we start. The second one is that problems need to be solved before we can move forward. The third one is that we need control over everything. It has to work out exactly as we envision it should. If it doesn’t that means we’ve failed or we did something wrong or we’re being blocked and we’re not supposed to do that thing.
Accountability. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it mean?
Well, there is what society tells us it means, which is to fix the problems that we see around us. Being accountable means fixing things that we think are wrong. Accountability from a societal perspective, is an ego-driven behavior fueled by judgment.
From the Oxford Language dictionary accountability means, “the fact or condition of being accountable; responsibility”.
If you follow me on social media, I said no content for a bit so I could write my book and I lied! ;) That’s because when the juicy stuff happens I have to share it with you. Yes, I’m still writing the book. I’ve written almost 10 000 words in 3 days and I’m super excited about what’s showing up there! That will continue, except that I need to write this first!
I’ve said many times that when I follow my intuitive guidance, I do it because I know the value of the journey that I’m about to go on. Even if I don’t know the point of the path or why I’m being asked to go in that direction, I know there are things on that path that I need and I’m willing to go explore that to find them.
I’m no longer afraid of that journey and of those choices because I see the value in them without ever knowing what I’m going to find when I go there. Don’t get me wrong because I used to feel that fear every time my intuition would ask me for something. But what I learned after a lot of repetition was that there was more value in the journey than there was in the outcome. Learning that is what allowed me to let go of the fear of simply going with it.
Being happy is an amazing goal! I want everybody to be happy. I want everybody to be able to be okay in their own skin. I want everybody to be excited when they get up in the morning. I want everybody to be okay.
Truth be told, my original goal was happiness in a lot of ways. I had some external things that I wanted to change to create that, but at the core of it was a need to simply be happy.
Happiness for me meant taking my power back, making my own choices, doing my own thing, and living my life on my own terms. Happiness for me meant being okay in my own skin and not being terrified to breathe every second of every day.
To get there though, I had to deal with me first. I had to make myself the priority and decide that the way for me to be okay was to put myself at the top of my own list. This is the first place the argument happens isn’t it? This is the first place we run into trouble. We are taught to put everybody and the kitchen sink before ourselves. Why are we taught this? Because the people teaching it didn’t know better.
Love and hate are equal and opposite viewpoints.
They are both valid.
They are both belief systems.
They both deserve the same amount of respect.
They are neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, they are neutral. The ideas of right and wrong or good and bad are human constructs that create more problems than they solve most of the time.
So let's talk about how I see the world these days. I think what I'm about to share with you will surprise you and may actually upset you. For convenience here, I'm going to simplify this into two teams: team woke and team hate. Obviously there are many people with varying viewpoints, but to keep the blog from being incredibly long I'm only going to acknowledge the two groups.