Monday Mindfulness Minute: Whose Story Are You Trying to Live?

"Be yourself; everybody else is already taken." -Oscar Wilde

What does it mean to live your own story? How would one achieve that in a world where we crave and depend on belonging to a group for our identity and survival?

When we consider the stories that the history books remember — those of bravery over fear, courage over doubt, and innovation over stagnation — one aspect remains consistent: they lived a life of their own. Sure, they stood on the shoulders of those who came before, and worked together with others, but their greatness was found in their courage to live their unique story.

Martin Luther King Jr. was one of those brave souls whose story continues to echo and percolate long after his final words from the pulpit. In his last sermon before he was assassinated, he taught that we must redefine our definition of greatness and mature beyond the simple definition of greatness as merely acquiring what society deems necessary for happiness. As MLK Jr. said in his speech when talking of Jesus, "He did none of the usual things that the world associates with greatness. He had no credentials but himself."

So what are credentials? They are a system of identification that must be approved by someone else to gain entry or acceptance. The room we spend our days laboring to enter is one where society is the boucer and says we can only enter if we have x, if we do y, or if we hang out with z.

I had these exact credentials at one time in my life and entered "the room" that society is selling us as a panacea for our suffering. Unfortunately, as you likely have discovered, it doesn't contain the happiness and fulfillment that society claims. It's a stale room filled with artificial replicas of life. It's sort of like being crammed in an overcrowded waiting room, picture the DMV, filled with others who are also waiting to start living.

This type of replica and artificial life is exactly what the baker lived in The Alchemist. The baker was someone who loved to travel from an early age and wanted more than anything to see the world. Instead of following his dreams and living his unique path, he prioritized a life of stability, and the daily grind of owning his bakery drowned any opportunity for him to realize his "personal legend." Unfortunately, and as the wise old man in The Alchemist recounted, "In the long run, what people think about shepards and bakers becomes more important for them than their own personal legends."

This exact reason, caring what other people think and trying to get a credential from them so we can start living, is why it feels like a piece of us is always missing. The piece that is missing is us. Our unique, 1 of 8.2 billion life. As Carl Jung said, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."

One way to start living our own story is by adopting the advice that Rick Ruben gives to the musical artists he advises: "the audience comes last." I'm sure we can count the many ways each day we put the audience, society, and what everyone thinks first. Can we remember a time we have put them anywhere but first?

What would our life be if we stopped putting the thoughts of others before our deepest desires and beliefs? It would be our own life. A unique and fantastic life filled with its own set of twists and turns. But it would be completely yours. Once we realize we've had the credentials to enter our own life all along, we can enter our own story, and there we will find adventure, peace, and fulfillment.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: There is No Peace in Pieces

If you've ever felt the numbness of not feeling like you could bring a piece of yourself to a certain situation, whether with your family, at work, or out in public, you understand exactly what no peace in pieces means. While it may seem that the belief, value, or some other indispensable part of ourselves is so small that it won't hurt to cover up or hide, we know we'll never be at peace because there is a piece of us missing.

On top of that, where is the peace in trying to juggle which piece of our story we'll reveal depending on who we are around? Have you ever felt that exhaustion? Better yet, have you felt the peace of not having to keep those stories straight anymore?

It turns out that trying to present a certain picture of "who we are" depending on how we arrange the pieces isn't a trait we inherit at birth but is a habit that we learn from watching our family and society trade in their authenticity and uniqueness for a shallow mold of themselves. While living in pieces may gain us a bit of acceptance in the short run, we eventually mature to see how living this compartmentalized life slowly eats away at us from the inside.

So how do we return to ourselves and the wholeness that is our birthright? I think it's a little like the process of alchemy described in The Alchemist, whereby "impure" base metals comprised of many different individual parts are heated and purified until they reach oneness, purity. I imagine that when we come to this plane as babies, we are pure gold. The trip that society/parents/everybody lays on us causes us to lose purity, and we devolve to a state (base metal in this analogy) where we care more about what people think of us than how we can live authentically. The only way to get that metal back to its pure form is through exposing it to heat, in our case, the suffering we feel from living in pieces, which slowly removes all that is not us. As Eckhart Tolle recounts in A New World, "In the midst of conscious suffering, there is already the transmutation. The fire of suffering becomes the light of consciousness."

An ease to life returns when the pieces of who we are finally combine because suddenly, maybe for the first time since childhood, we can be the same person with everyone. No more covering. No more shifting. Life becomes effortless this way. More importantly, by having the courage to live our authentic life, we encourage others to thrive in their wholeness.

Monday Mindfulness Minute: Time Flies... And That's Ok

It amazes and frustrates me how time seems to stretch or shrink depending on what I'm doing and with whom. How is it that Friday afternoon before a long weekend seems to take an eternity, while the actual weekend appears to be over in a second? Or why is it that the task we hate seems to take forever to finish, while the activity we love seems to be fleetingly short at best?

We've all heard that "Time flies when you're having fun," but why is that? More importantly, where is the fun in that? And why does it feel like such an unfair aspect of being human? Any of us, if given the chance to make our own world, would craft one where time would not speed up but would instead slow down during the good moments.

So, where does time go during the good moments? And if we are so scared and disappointed with time flying by or potentially running out of time, why do those timeless moments feel so good?

Maybe it's because joy doesn't come from timing the minutes we spend doing what we love, but from the minutes disappearing. I love the quote, "Eternity doesn't mean 'forever." Eternity means beyond time." In all the moments of joy, the mind that primarily lives in the realm of past and future somehow recedes, and we are left firmly rooted in the present. It's in the present where the clock disappears, and we are left with experiencing life unveiled by scary thoughts of running out of time or not having enough time.

It makes sense; we are afraid of losing time because it feels like we're wasting a special gift. But can we consider it lost time if we lose ourselves in the moment? Being in the moment and doing what we love is sort of like the feeling of a full belly after a satisfying meal. Would it make sense to have our bellies full and be worried that we somehow lost the food in the process? We didn't lose the food - we fully ingested the food. The same is true with time. It's not that we lose time when it disappears, we have fully ingested the life within that time and can rest in being ful-filled.

Time flying isn't a bad thing. Chase those moments when time disappears, and you'll never find yourself short of time.