The Results...
"To Life...You are the only answer!" I like that quote; that idea. To the big question: What is it all about? What does it all mean? I like Leonard Cohen's explanation that being a poet is a verdict, not a job description.
That is to say, one can only be called a poet at the end of his/her life, if he or she has lived their life as a poet! So similarly for me, the meaning of life is the meaning I will have given my life, by having lived it in the way I have! So to that I ask myself: What will my life mean, to me? What in the end, will I have achieved with this, my life, that is meaningful to me?
Nobody else can do it for you! No one else can live your life, for you! NO one else can write or, more importantly, has written your autobiography. You are the Author!
Working in the mental health field as a front line therapist I see results. That is to say, the result that is created when human beings are repressed, suppressed & depressed from their possibilities, creativity, and from living fully!
Schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, depression, anxieties and phobias, and substance abuse, tied in the ribbon of hopelessness that is created by a set of beliefs about who we are that is pervasive in our culture: limited and broken physical beings...
It's not a matter of Why these results happen; it is a matter of "No wonder" we're this way!!!
When we grow through the systems that are set before us (family, school, religion..) and supported by the adult world, we cannot resist long enough, as children, not to be affected by that (rules, beliefs, values, attitudes, modelling of behavior...etc...)
The menial increments with which we continue to gauge progress will lead us to our graves as a collective, never having achieved a new understanding or "belief" about who and what we are and can become.
When I "counsel" these persons that come to me with various degrees of motivation, my conversation with them is about getting to know who they think/believe they are before I have the next conversation about what they hold as possible for themselves. If I start anywhere else, I am "treating" their condition, rather than respecting them as my equal and acknowledging that they are more than their "dis-ease". That is about connection. It is about having them feel "connected" in a way they may not have felt in a long time, or ever (in their consciousness).
The main concern I have for them is about their realizing and recognizing their ability to "choose"!
If we do not acknowledge and hold as possible our ability to choose, we are living life from a victim stance. Only when we acknowledge our ability to choose, consistantly, can we accept our ability to respond to Life and become "response-able" (responsible)! Becoming responsible produces better results; especially when it is not equated with guilt, or blaming ourselves, but rather with acknowledging that only we can move differently through our world/life when we want to.
With the few persons who attend the services we deliver publicly or privately, we must acknowledge that the majority of those living life in desperate measures do not make it through our doors. To me, that says that most of us, if not all, are on the same scale some may call "dis-eased", and that it's just a matter of the intensity with which these "issues" appear in our lives. I believe it's more useful to call it the scale of human experience, and to see it as our just being in a different set of circumstances than other persons, in this moment.
I am in charge of the results I get! And I know that the results are not how I "end up", but rather where I am in this moment. With that, I get to look at them with open eyes, and choose, whether I continue to live with those results or change the manner in which I move through the world, to get different ones (results)!
Ever since i have started to move through my days, based on the recognition of the "truths" that flow in me, rather than outside of me, my life has evolved in
immeasurable, and definite ways.
"Once you trust yourself, you will know how to live!"
Johann Van Goeth
creating at the rhythm of my breath.
RAY