“
This week, I received an email from a teen asking for help with a personal challenge, needing guidance to find the Light – and feeling alienated because her family did not support her spirituality.
This young woman felt she could not change under her circumstances, external and personal. So rather than answer her individually, I’m answering here in the weekly Tune-up, because we all feel like she does sometimes. We all feel like the chips are against us, and that something external, or internal, is preventing us from moving forward.
So for Casey, and for all of us, here is an excerpt from Life Rules:
Change begins with our willingness to feel what we are going through, and we can’t do that if we take ourselves out of the present moment with reactive behavior. To truly transform, we must be open to having a compassionate relationship with all parts of ourselves—even those parts we most dislike, those parts that bring us the most trouble.
But how can we get to know these parts when they are always hiding, or yelling, or running away? If we rein in our reactive behavior, then we can sit with it, feel it, get to know it. And by doing so, we can transform it into proactive behavior, which is healing both for ourselves and for others.
My ADD was probably the biggest obstacle I faced in those [teen] years, and in many ways that continues to be true today. It’s not the kind of thing that just goes away; I had to adapt to it. But once I stopped being so angry with myself and with my lot in life, I was able to appreciate my ADD.
Just as I grew to like an onion bagel with extra cream cheese, I learned to appreciate the different paths my ADD took me on. I became a much stronger person for having to learn how to care for myself in particular ways. My ADD also protected me from many potentially dangerous situations.
And by having to leave school at painful moments, I stumbled into various adventures and met interesting people. I began to view my ADD as a gift, and I still do.
There is a reason behind everything. And because of this, everything is a gift. The more we understand this, the more we can curb our reactive behavior. And the more we curb our reactive behavior, the more our lives will be filled with the Light in practical terms, learning to resist reactive behavior is like learning any new skill.
It takes practice, and you have to start small. It doesn’t make sense to wake up tomorrow morning and set about resisting your biggest, most painful reactive behavior. You will need to build up to this.
So practice with the girl who cuts you off in the cafeteria line, or the guy who takes your parking space at school. Then gradually move up to folks with whom you have more intimate relationships: best friends, family, perhaps a teacher.
Since I have begun my work as a teacher and author, I have had the honor to know many young men and women in their teens. I have some sense of the issues you are facing, the countless decisions that must be made each day. It’s not always clear which situations require Resistance and which don’t.
So follow your instincts. Pay special attention to those cases when you know something is bad for you, but you decide to do it anyway —or when you get a funny feeling in your stomach that lets you know that something is up.
And don’t forget that reactive behavior revolves just as much around seemingly positive moments as it does around obstacles. It’s all too easy to become addicted to praise or a sense of belonging. By feeling secure or smart or pretty on the basis of a compliment or a sense of inclusion, we are reacting to someone else’s sense of us, not our own.
And while this is common human behavior, it is also reactive. So as you practice Resistance, be sure to work with compliments as well as insults!
This week, if we all practice a little more Resistance, we’ll find this entire world in a greater place of Light. And again, I encourage you to share your experience with me – whether you’re a teen or just sometimes feel like one – we’re all on this path together.
All the best,
Yehuda
www.yehudaberg.com
Find us on Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment