Virtue Sets the Coordinates

I am not going to try to find the perfect scripture for what I am about to say because I believe it would require cutting and pasting the entire bible. So allow me to summarize. You carry within you the capacity for virtuosity. Now, I know, this word is rarely used to describe a person but hang with me. Technically, this word means "great skill in music oranother artistic pursuit" (Oxford Languages).

And that is exactly what I intend to convey about you and all humans. When we bear the image of God, it is not a replica, it's a tiny piece. You are not THE God or even A God, but you bear his image by holding within your spirit a virtue that is attributable to God. You arrived with it and I assume we take it back with us when we return to our heavenly home.

This virtue is what needs to be mirrored to us and rarely is. This virtue, once identified, sets the coordinates for the rest of our work as long as we live. This virtue, when combined with the virtues carried in the bodies of all the other humans on earth will change the world.

It will be virtue that will bring heaven to earth.

And we will have to release our habitual ways of being in the world to allow it to rise up and take hold of your choices.

If you do not know what your virtue is, do not give up the hunt. For you life will not longer be about what you lack, get wrong, or have been hurt by. Your life will be one big adventure of ridding yourself of any of the ties that bind you to your small way of seeing yourself, your false beliefs and limited thoughts, your mis-guided albeit sincere emotions and your unproductive way of doing things.

Keep looking. You are in there. You are worth the fight.

Still Growing

I want to warn you about new problems. Most people will prefer that you keep your old ones because they are predictable for them, and they never have to re-evaluate their assumptions about you. This is unpleasant for the brain who craves consistency over wisdom, habit over discernment.

My beloved tennis playing husband has a whole new set of problems now that I can place my serve and my cross-court backhand is smoking. He has a new set of angles to consider because I am getting to the corners and running into the net like I mean business. I still miss a fair number of these shots, but I am making him think and his brain HATES that.

But here is what we both love. We love that we know that we may be old but we are still growing. THAT is very sexy. Go be your sexy self today!

Change something!

Mirror, Mirror

If our brain, limited as it is, jumps to conclusions and makes some assumptions early in life, it is pretty darn hard to get those pesky and wrong-headed beliefs and thoughts to vacate the premises. Honestly, I liken it to a Christmas miracle.

How does it happen? I do not know, but I can share a bit about what happened to me.

I had some really, really gentle and great mirroring. The mirror effect is a reflection of one's self through the gaze of others. Gentle mirroring can build rapport and trust, if done with discernment and wisdom. Here is the trick. We all have "mirror neurons" in the parietal lobe region of the brain. It is located at the upper back area in the skull. It processes sensory information and is really quite good at picking up cues like anxiety (which is why anxiety is catching) and whatnot.

Some people, due to the way their own brain is built with its own set of preconceived notions, are like fun house mirrors. They PROJECT their image of themselves on you. For example, if I am feeling anxious, I might project on Pete by saying, "Are you ok? How are you feeling? Is something bothering you?" I'm the one having all the feelings, but I am projecting my feelings on him, maybe even my thoughts and beliefs.

Another fun house mirror distortion is INTROJECTION. A person walks into a room and notices someone who is feeling uncomfortable, agitated, sad. And the person who walked into the room feeling happy and excited for the dinner party all of a sudden thinks, "Wow. Something is wrong with me. I'm feeling uncomfortable, agitated and sad." No, they are not. They just picked up someone else's vibes and confused them with their own.

So here's what I learned that is really important. Your mirrors matter. Once I did not have so much exposure to fun house mirrors, the voices in my life began to sing a song, in sync and perfect rhythm that kept reflecting back to me, "You can make mistakes. You do not have to be responsible for making everyone happy or solving their problems. Get some new problems. Your problems. What problems do you want to solve that are yours?"

So, if no one has ever said this to you before, let me channel my inner Mary Oliver and paraphrase her - each of us only has one wild and precious life - what do you want to do with yours? What problems do you have to solve to live it? Do you need to go back to school? Do you need therapy? Do you want to do some Enneagram work with me or someone else who guides you through the growth path most suited for you? Do you want to change jobs? Do you want to change houses? Do you want to play a bit better tennis or golf or tiddlywinks? Solve those problems.

You are NOT the Problem

Remember my friend from yesterday's post who felt her problems were too unique for anyone else to possibly understand? I feel her. I understand, maybe not perfectly, but I do have some experience with a problem or two that has been statistically unique and complex. I do not happen to have that kind of problem today, maybe tomorrow a problem like that will pop up. But today, my brain is not on high alert trying to make something complicated simple. My brain is relaxed and more able to fire on all its cylinders, not just the survival instinct part of my brain.

When I can have a "whole brain" experience, I can ponder and remember and learn and consider new ways of seeing an issue. One hypothesis I have about my friend, because I've history with the same issue, is fear. I don't know about her, but when I have one of those big hairy problems that feels like it might swallow me, my last nerve resists MORE problems. And, I am deathly afraid someone will tell me that a problem this big is all my fault. I am bad. I am wrong. I am to blame. Who wants to add THAT to an already over-heated brain trying to survive?

Let me just say one more personal thing, to give you, dear reader, a bit of context. I have survived big problems in the past. Not the biggest, not the most unique, not BIG T trauma (well, maybe a couple of BIG T traumas), but I have survived problems. But my brain, for reasons I have some clarity on at this point in my life, has always believed that if I were good enough (not bad), smart enough (not dumb), worked hard enough (not lazy), then I WOULD HAVE NO PROBLEMS. So every problem, no matter how big or small, was in some way MY FAULT. See the reasoning? This kind of belief, will, eventually, say after your mother dies, a pandemic strikes, you live through a politically tumultuous time... cause your brain to short-circuit and explode.

And when that happened to me, I carried on, because isn't that what you're supposed to do? And...I got help. Lots of help. Lots of different kinds of help. And to my utter amazement, whether I was learning how to dead lift more weight than I believed I could lift, or zooming with my therapist, or talking with my physician, or taking a tennis lesson... I learned that mistakes are not big deal. Problems are inevitable and that you can have a multitude of problems without ever having to point a finger and assign blame or declare a winner of who is at fault. If my mind were not already blown, this would have surely resulted in the same outcome.

I did not know this. I could explain to you why I think I did not know this, but the whys no longer interest me. What has captivated my attention, energized my mind and body and spirit, is this idea that having a problem is inevitable and normal. Our work is NOT to avoid problems; our work is to take responsibility for our problems.

Mind blown. How about you?

Stuck on the Details…

I have this friend who is having trouble in her marriage. She has decided that her problem is so unique, so special, that no one can help her navigate it and find a path through it to a new and better problem.

Maybe she is right; I am very curious about this approach to life and I wonder if she is onto something I cannot see. I am also curious and wonder what would happen if she broadened her identity a bit. What if, instead of seeing all the exceptions to life that define her - what would happen if she chose to think about her situation more simply?

What if, for example, she chose to think of herself as a wife and mother? What would her core values be? What kind of wife would she want to be? How would she show up in the relationship? How would she want to show up as a mother? What values does she want to stand by and express?

I observe this so often in myself and others - we get very caught up in the details of our story. And it truly is OUR story, the one we tell ourselves and stand by with the loyalty of a brain that has limitations and prefers habitual patterns rather than insights and transformation. We get stuck on the minutia of the story, rather than focusing on our responsibility and the values we care about and how we want to take responsibility for living them in our present day life.

If she, and I, and you, could think like this more often we might be not only more curious, but more eager to ask for outside voices to challenge our brain's stubborn resistance to humility. We might ask for support. We might listen to learn rather than react to opinions that vary from our own certainty. We might end up with better, more interesting problems.