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Like the rest of you, Dear Readers, I have a lot of habits in my day-to-day life. Some I am aware of and some I am not. Some I need to break and others I need to keep. I struggle with change and growth, as we all do, but I will say that it has become easier as I have cultivated faith.
Most people avoid therapy, meditation, and faith for the same reasons - it basically requires admitting that something is wrong and we need to change. It’s much easier to be angry at others, to blame our partners, our work, our environments, politics, the media, anyone other than ourselves. We only turn to therapy, or faith, or self-help when things get really bad and we have to acknowledge that we are the common denominator in our dysfunction.
This is difficult for a variety of reasons. I heard a conversation between Terry Real and Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab podcast recently, in which Real said that people with low self-esteem often feel like they have to earn their love. In reality, love is the great equalizer. Real called it a “democracy,” meaning one heart, one vote when it comes to our inherent worth and value.
It’s a lovely premise and a wonderfully simple way to describe it, but I also know that many of us, particularly those of who have experienced significant stress or trauma in childhood, really struggle with this idea. Yes, we all should believe that we become worthy of love just by virtue of being born, but many of us do not feel that way.
If we have been working our little BLEEPS off to earn love, it becomes a truly miserable experience to realize that all this time, all this effort, and it turns out we have been doing the wrong kind of work. What a waste. How embarrassing. What in the actual BLEEP.
Only through trying everything, often over and over, and still getting nowhere or even making things worse, do we become willing to turn to therapy, self-help, or faith, often as a last ditch effort to feel better. We become willing to do another kind of work all together. The work of healing, of having faith, the work of feeling better, the work of doing well.
Most of us have a hard time slowing down, sitting still, meditating, praying, and waiting for change to come to us. It makes all that previous effort just plain embarrassing. It makes us feel stupid, perhaps even pathetic.
Fortunately, one of the most incredible things about finding true faith in it’s simplest form, without all the trappings, bells, and whistles of religion, is it restores us with grace, with compassion, with forgiveness, first for ourselves, then for others. I don’t know exactly how it works, but it does. And I know that there is peace, calm, love, and care beyond the quiet of prayer and meditation.