Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration reading from Chapter 11 of Stop Doing That Shit by Gary John Bishop. The title of this chapter is “Tip of the Spear.”
There are lots of nuggets today, some of which we will separate into an action plan. Let’s dive in:
- Remember, if certainty is key for a human being, then providing evidence for what you have already concluded is critical to that certainty. Your conclusions are your rock, the “truth” from where you can make sense of this world.
- When you put the three saboteurs together, what is your primary experience of being alive? That will be the final piece of the puzzle of understanding why you are the way you are, so that we can get to how to put self-sabotage to bed once and for all.
- There’s a way that being alive feels to you. THAT’S the point of the spear: what it’s like for you to be alive.
- That feeling, that experience of yourself, is where your conclusions combine to form a very personal experience of actually being you, something that permeates every part of your being.
- It’s not just the way you look at life—it’s the place from which you engage with life. The way you hear it, see it, smell it, touch it, are inspired by it and deflated by it. A location from which you interact with everyone and everything you come into contact with.
- Instead of a point of view, it’s what I call your point of experience. The place from which you experience everything. Your distinct and unique starting point in life. No matter the future you are out to have, you are always starting from this same, familiar place, located by those three fundamental conclusions, your three saboteurs.
- You are completely shaped by those three saboteurs in a way that, until now, has been explained by you in terms of moods or emotions or behaviors or circumstances.
- Your life is a constant stream of same old, same old. No matter your dreams or hopes, it’s all from the same self-imposed starting point, and that starting point isn’t a starting point at all, really. You are in essence always behind, always at the bottom of the hill, always working your way up or toward a new goal or objective or outcome.
- There are also those times when you get inspired by something—you fall in love with someone or get excited about a pay raise or a new job, or you get lit up by some new kind of opportunity for yourself. A new outlook emerges, and you’re starting to feel pretty good about your life and where it’s headed. In short, your present life is starting to echo with the life you want. It might not have all the pieces, but you’re on track, right?
- Give this some thinking. If you are truly out to live a completely new life with a host of new results, could you live that new life as the same old you? NO!
- Whatever new life you want for yourself requires you to be different. You can’t be the same you you’ve always been, but at the same time you’re also being pulled, dragged, and skewed by your three saboteurs, magnetically drawn back to that familiar point of experience. It just won’t work. To authentically change your life requires you to authentically change yourself. A new life might require you to be more patient, more loving, more reliable, more bold, more vulnerable, more loyal, more focused or dedicated, more sociable, whatever the thing is: this new area will require you to be a different you! AND YOU CAN’T DO IT!!
- That “new” you would be too uncertain, too risky, too overwhelming, too confusing and unnerving to face head-on.
Here’s the action plan for you today:
What does genuine acceptance look like? Let’s do a quick exercise.
Right now, think of something in your life that you barely, if ever, give thought to, something so mundane and benign it just fades into the background of your thoughts. It could be anything—the color of your car, your middle name, the light bulb above your head, the size of your feet. Any item that, when you give it some thought, has no impact on you one way or the other. You experience neither joy nor frustration nor sadness nor passion nor any emotional state connected to it. You literally experience nothing with regard to that item.
Do you know why that item has zero impact on you?
Because you genuinely accept that item the way it is. You have no urge for it to be better or different or for it to change in any way. You’re not “past it” or “getting over it,” and you have no need to cut it from your life or barely even think, let alone talk, about it.
And so, it sits there. Accepted. Undisturbed.
It has no bearing on you because you accept it for what it is. That item is itself, and while it’s part of your life, it has no influence on you. There is no emotional tug at you.
That’s what true acceptance is for a human being. When you can let something be itself without any charge or reaction around that thing. When it has no influence, and I mean NONE, good or bad. Nothing either way.
You can’t ignore the darker parts of your unconscious. You can’t repress them. Because they don’t go anywhere. And oftentimes they just keep getting worse and emboldened by your attempts at having them go away or be somehow changed. Fueled by years of scratching that itch over and over and over. The basement of your mind is the perfect place for all your doubts and your fears to grow. Just as long as you keep giving them the sprinkle of daylight they need from time to time.
Until you accept them. Just right where they sit. In the dark.
Nothing to say about them, nothing to do with them other than let them be.
That’s why we’re going to stop running from our conclusions, stop trying to overcome them through denial, avoidance, or never-ending effort. Dig into your conclusions. Investigate and explore them. Uncover your point of experience on the map.
Let yourself be present to those days, weeks, months, and years of self-sabotage, of the struggle to get better, of temporary victories and mind-numbing plunges into the depths of the darkness.
Let all of that up, sit in that stew . . . and then accept.
That’s right, accept all of it. Realize that these conclusions are only a part of you, not all of you. Make peace with the fact that they’re here to stay and that your struggle to change them is what makes them play such a big part in your life. Your unease has become your disease.
Let it be, right here, right now. Just as it is.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Acceptance is a practice. It’s a conscious exercise, a reminder—sometimes daily, hourly, or by the minute—to free yourself from your automatic reactions and triggers, to give yourself the space you need to forge a life free of self-sabotage and self-doubt. To begin living from the space granted by acceptance.
You’ve been living on autopilot for most of your life. What would it look like to be able to recognize and turn that off? To wake up to your life? To feel fully alive?
If this life were no longer about you questioning your intelligence or your capabilities, if people were no longer a threat or controlling or untrustworthy, if life weren’t a struggle or a disappointment, how would that change things? What kind of life could you take on?
Who could you be?
