Embrace

How to Embrace the Change That is Before You

May 7, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

Come gather ’round people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth savin’

And you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’

—Bob Dylan

Dylan’s reflection visits every day. Times are changing. Wisps of nostalgia and recollection of times past do not slow the Change Train. I just watched my home team lose in the first round to the Minnesota Timberwolves. The Phoenix Suns used to beat up on the Timberwolves year after year. But, no more. I used to be able to run twice a day every day of the week without struggle. But, no more. Father Time has influenced my capacity to bounce back and keep going. I enjoyed close to 30 years working with Psychological Counseling Services in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s been three years since it all ended. The times have changed.

And so it is for you too! What worked yesterday is not what works today. People say that raising children today is a lot different than 20 years ago. They say that the family unit is more under attack now than before. Perhaps, but it just underscores that times change. The world economy, society, and culture simply keep evolving. Nostalgia is nice but it doesn’t prepare for the present moment. We learn by reflecting on the past but we bring forth what lessons we have gained and let go of the past. This is what it means to embrace the change that is before you.

Nothing remains the same.

Here are some considerations regarding managing the change that is before you today:

1. With success or failure, adjust your attitude to be hungry and curious about the change that tomorrow’s challenge will bring. In his book, The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck likens the journey through life to traveling through the desert. He said many people, desperate to quench their thirst, rejoice and celebrate when arriving at the first oasis in the desert. In fact, they are so happy that they decide to build an encampment and live there for the rest of their lives. He writes most people never adjust their sites to venture through the entire desert. There is nothing immoral or wrong about choosing to become an oasis-dweller. However, the flow of life brings the need for evaluation and change. What worked yesterday is unlikely to be as effective today. Some people say well I have been doing what I do for quite some time, why make significant change now. Recovery success lulls an addict to sleep. It will do the same to you with whatever pursuits are important to you. Yesterday is a word that reflects on the historical past. In order to thrive you must be willing to adjust to tomorrow’s change. I am not suggesting immediate wholesale change but I am suggesting always tweaking the edges and challenging the center toward becoming the best version of who you are. You don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater but you will need new refreshing bathwater for tomorrow. When you have miserably failed it is not difficult to yearn for something more. When you know much past success, that is when change is difficult to embrace. Evaluate the times around you. It might be business, recovery, or your significant relationship. The passing of time is the shadow of change. If your attitude does not include a desire to embrace new pathways, you will not be hungry or curious to adapt to what is needed in your recovery or your business tomorrow.

2. Come to terms with your limits: I am aware that there is an emphasis on reaching beyond your limits. In many applications to life I agree. Another important consideration is that when you know your limits well you can pivot and focus on doing something very different which you failed at before. Some people think that “no limits” means you just beat your head against the same wall time and again. After you take medication for your headache, consider the term limit as a metaphor. When you know your shortcomings you can access the brilliance that lies deep within you. your limits are only a suggestion to do something different that can be resourced deeper within you. You can go as deep within as you choose. You are less likely to be open to creative change as long as you only focus on the limit that you think you should be able to overcome. Why not work with it and go deep? Active acceptance of what is opens your heart to the creative genius—your brilliance that is limitless within.

3. Lean into the experiences that life brings you to: If you fail in your pursuits and cannot comprehend what the results of your efforts are trying to tell you, don’t be too quick to run to the next application for the possibility of success. Even if you are cornered by great financial pressure to figure out how to get some dough right now, take time to sit with your failure—all your feelings, your thoughts and process what brought you to this point. Be real! Sift and sort for meaningfulness in the presence of your daily experience (recovery, business, or both). Counterintuitively, leaning into your experience of struggle, emotional pain, loss, and failure will help you move forward. Allowing dust to settle helps to establish a clear pathway. Life’s purpose in time and space is revealed through your willingness to be vulnerable.

4. Trust the process of transformation. If you could just have a blueprint that shows you where you are and reminds you that on the other side of your struggle and trouble, it will all look like this! But, transformation in life does not work this way. You must know that you cannot know what is happening in the moment of your transformation. It doesn’t occur in an instant. Like the rising sun, it happens in its time! It is impossible to see what is emerging in your life when opportunities, health, and people are taken from your life. It is hard to believe in transformation when the feeling of deprivation is in every corner of your life. Transformation brings you to a place where you cannot go back. You can no more go back and create what you hoped for than you can wear the same pair of blue jeans when you were in junior high! Those experiences have been scoured from your life.

When you do embrace the change that is real in your life, you will be given the invitation and the power to welcome the experience of something new that will transform the limits that you thought were insurmountable in your past endeavors. It is from the place of embracing change that the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau was inspired to write “I have learned this at least by my experience: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours”.

Embrace the change that is before you and experience the transformation that is to be a part of your destiny.

Bitter or Better? Living in the Broken Places of Life

January 2, 2024 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

People with disabilities are often professors to the world regarding coming to terms with broken places in life. We all experience broken places in our lives–some less obvious than others, some less socially judged than others. Yet brokenness and limitation are universal challenges all humanity must face. When we don’t, we contribute to life imbalance. At this point, addicts can be triggered by addictive demands and take up too much space in relationships by wanting what they want when they want it. Life imbalance can become extraordinary in terms of how people contribute to global warming in its many forms of polluting our world and becoming insensitive and ignoring other people’s needs for survival. The COVID-19 pandemic became worse when people ignored limits, choosing to not practice responsible living, and endangering more vulnerable and susceptible people around them because they too, want what they want when they want it.

People with observable disabilities often learn how to incorporate limitations within life because they have no choice but to come to terms with their restraint and challenge. When you don’t come to terms with your limitations in life you will succumb to becoming bitter which becomes an obstacle to learning how to become better. Today many addicts are stuck and unwilling to surrender to the acceptance of their limitations. They resent not being able to have whatever it is they cannot. Addicts are not alone. Many non-addict people are stuck in the same place.

One of life’s challenges is to figure out how to live meaningfully in the broken places of life. When you embrace your limitations, immediately you will feel lonely and obscure. Within there is an urge to do or be what you cannot. When you face your limitation there can be panic, fear, frustration, and resentment. These feelings are threatening, painful, and will stir much discomfort. Reactively, we want to escape or numb the feelings through distraction or minimization. Yet, the key to living with restraint is to learn to embrace your broken places in life. We all have them. Here are a few suggestions.

1: Accept what is. This doesn’t mean roll over and let the powers that be have their way. It means what Fritz Perls said, “Nothing changes until it is real”. You must face the reality of what is before you can change inside in such a way that changes the outside. Eldridge Cleaver once spoke of a “territorial imperative,” suggesting that when people know their surroundings, they know how to survive their environment. You have to know and accept your environment to thrive within it. This means that you must come to terms with your own limitations. To do this, you will need to grieve by leaning into the sadness and loss of what otherwise might have been. To accept certain deep losses of privilege, people, and position, it will be necessary for you to create a supportive group of people to help you through these very painful experiences.

2: Dare to Struggle. Struggle is a common-thread experience that holds within the capacity of human brilliance. The reason people with observable disabilities can teach so much about broken places is that many who have dared to struggle have discovered meaningfulness and the seed of brilliance within the limitation. Many people choose to curse their restraints or limitations all their life. Nelson Mandela wrote that by embracing the struggle of solitary confinement, he could emerge from prison undiminished. He was able to conserve and even replenish his own beliefs. Malcolm X taught that it doesn’t matter where you start out but where you end up. George Jackson taught that if you are not willing to die for what you believe in, then you what you fundamentally believe in is not deep enough.

To the world, these people are considered radicals. To people who face their disabilities, they represent words that they have chosen to embrace and have uncovered brilliant meaningfulness through their personal struggles. Many in the world scoff at broken places. Many would like to bury and forget the reality of those who suffer from disability–which in truth is everybody. The Zapatistas have a wonderful proverb: “They tried to bury us but they forgot we were seeds”. There is a fear of being buried by the limitations manifested in broken places of living. Transform your “curse” of brokenness into a blessing by daring to embrace the struggle.

3: Find meaningfulness in the broken place. Not one of us would sign up for the broken situation we face. I have never known an addict who said they would have signed up for their addiction. People joke about “if sex is an addiction I’ll sign up for that”, until they experience the heartache and excruciating pain that results from sexual out-of-control behavior. The reason many therapists treat addiction is that they are recovering addicts themselves. It’s a way of making meaningfulness from all the madness that exists in the broken place of addiction. Addiction stunts self-realization. People can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread. Frederick Douglass wrote, “If there is no struggle there is no progress. The power that dominates in your personal life will concede nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.” Finding meaningfulness in the broken place of life will require your willingness to struggle. Every struggle with defeat, heartbreak, and loss contains its own seed and lesson about how to make life better and not bitter. Tom Van Arsdale, a friend of mine, wrote, “Peace doesn’t come when everything goes right. Peace comes when you’re right with how everything goes.” The only way to replace bitterness with peace in the presence of limitation is to find meaningfulness in the broken places of life.

Failure Friendly

September 8, 2023 by Ken Wells

READ IT TO ME: Click play to listen to this post.

It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default. —J.K. Rowling

The Oxford Dictionary defines failure as the lack of success in doing or achieving something. Really! Somehow, with so much emphasis placed upon not failing in our world, you would think they would come up with something more pronounced than that. If that’s what it is, who doesn’t fail, not once but dozens of times every day? I didn’t brush my teeth twice today, I ran two not three miles. I didn’t clean the house, wash the car, read 50 pages from the book I committed to wade through, meditate, and stop eating yogurt! Some days it seems that I don’t achieve anything that I committed to do! Does that make me a failure?

There is such emphasis upon hiding the “don’t be’s” that the things you achieve get overlooked or minimized. You did put your goals down on paper. You did run two of the three miles on your goal sheet. You did brush your teeth one time of the twice-a-day goal. You did read 10 of the 50 pages you committed to read. While there are many things you can do to adjust your focus, strategy, and effort to achieve more, you are less likely to maintain perspective without a more friendly view of the word failure.

Baseball great Mickey Mantle once reflected on the experience of his Hall of Fame baseball career. He said, “During my 18 years of Major League Baseball I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out 1700 times and walked another 1,800 times. You figure a ball player will have about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.”

The average experience of a baseball player is making an out, not getting a hit. In the presence of striving for success, even for someone as great as Mickey Mantle, there is a compelling story of difficulty and strife to share. Mantle’s authentic willingness to connect with his intimate battle with failure forced him to practice the fundamental basics of self-care. As a result, these commonplace experiences of struggle enabled him to look back at his Hall of Fame career and create a meaningful perspective from his experience of professional failure.

Here are a few things to reflect on when addressing failure in life.

1. Everyone experiences daily failure. It is one of the common threads of everyday living.

2. Make sure you underscore what you did do when you highlight what you didn’t.

3. Fail forward. Wallowing in the mud of failure only gets you more muddy and in need of a bath.

4. Take time to grieve. It’s a bummer to come up short after all that effort! Feel shitty! Embrace the bitterness, anger, disappointment, and emptiness that come with failed results. Express it fully! Philosophical reflection can come later.

5. Funnel your grief into action. Don’t act prematurely. When you embrace your feelings around failure, you will know when it’s time to get off your duff and act. Don’t allow negative self-talk to stymie your view of future destiny. Most achievements are completed amidst the roar of negative talk from the conniving inner critic that attempts to sabotage destiny. Learn to ignore the negativity within like an athlete learns to block out the hostile heckles and catcalls in a stadium.

6. Be a heart champion. Model how to go from blight to beauty. Know that failure is a part of life. Determine never to let an outcome define who you are. Instead, let your definition be determined by the vision of destiny you have within that supersedes any result.

7. Chisel out a North Star focus. Cultivate support from others around you to maintain an “eye of the tiger” pursuit of your purpose and plans of fulfilling your destiny.

8. Re-define prosperity. Rather than scaling back your vision, transcend your pursuit and go beyond concrete results that ultimately you don’t control. Embrace the unconditional confidence that no matter what you experience, you can go down and come back up.

9. Clarify what growth means toward the goal you seek to achieve. There are many definitions of growth. If you only know growth by measuring the end result, you will miss the incremental steps that are necessary to get to the end result. Carefully clarify each step needed in your journey. It will help you to enlighten what you can and cannot control.

Strength and inspiration come through the experience of failure by sharing and connecting with the human spirit of others. You will experience a genuine depth of human connection when you learn to stay in the presence of overwhelming discomfort triggered by failure. The human spirit is resilient and has the capacity to transform agony into poise and healing peace when the discomfort and heartache of failure is embraced and shared.

Only the Lonely

July 11, 2023 by Ken Wells

“Only the lonely, Know the heartaches I’ve been through-Only the lonely-Know I cry and cry for you.”
(Roy Orbison “Only the Lonely” lyrics)

Loneliness drives escapism. In an unsettled world there are a million different reasons to want to avoid reality. Traumatic experiences in home life can trigger the desire to travel anywhere but home to escape further stress and psychological harm. More than 15 million Americans suffer loneliness attributed to major clinical depression. Many will do anything to escape the dregs of emptiness, loneliness and anxiety that come with it. However, a temporary new environment is not the cure. Often, when this form of escape through travel is done impulsively, there’s a greater likelihood that symptoms will rebound or return even stronger than before. Lonely older adults are twice as likely to be prescribed an antidepressant compared to adults reporting no loneliness (27% vs 14%). This indicates that medication alone is not a cure to the challenge of loneliness.

Most addicts suffer from loneliness. For many, home was disastrous, chaotic, totally abusive and unsafe. People need to belong, experience sanctuary and be treated with dignity and respect. Addicts run from the fear that if they slow down they will have to face the anxiety and terror of coming home to themselves. The experience is devastating. For those who do not come to terms with loneliness, it is a shadow that follows and never releases its grip. Addicts in recovery must learn to manage the experience of loneliness. It is a major trigger for relapse. Here are a few considerations to help you work with this common malady that affects everyone.

1. Practice coming home to yourself: Addicts learn to lose themselves with busyness and activities that distract from the discomfort of anxiety and other difficult emotions. Thich Nat Hanh stated that sitting is an act of revolution. In the presence of the urge to rush and be active, it is counterintuitive to sit with your feelings. However, sitting with your feelings will cultivate awareness. It helps to separate your thoughts and emotions from your true nature. As some say, sitting helps you to see your true nature to be like the sky and your feelings and thoughts to be like the clouds that come and go away. Coming home to yourself is a way of connecting with yourself and accepting what is.

2. Quiet the clamor and clutter by putting away your electronic devices for a definite period of time each day. It has been said that in America, the average person spends 7 hours looking at a screen each day. Your computer and cell phone distract you from being connected with yourself. You would think social media would help you to connect with others. However, it is an illusion that social media helps you to connect with others when you do not connect with yourself. Technology does not help reduce loneliness. Take time each day to turn off your phone and all other technology each day to cultivate conscious awareness. Make it a deliberate act.

3. Connect with the here and now. Distractions keep you from being present. You might be doing something important but your mind is somewhere else. People go through their life distracted without being connected to the present moment. Poet T.S. Eliot penned “we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”. Many people will never experience this reality in reflection because they don’t know how to connect to the present moment. Don’t allow yourself to live a life of distraction from the here and now.

4. Go Inside. Loneliness is about feeling disconnected from others. You won’t connect with others until you connect with yourself. Becoming a social butterfly can make you popular with many acquaintances. Yet, you can be lonely in a crowd of people. Loneliness will disappear when you go inside. Learn to become an island to yourself. Buddhists teach that you go inside yourself through the in-breath and the out-breath. Hahn says that you tidy your home within by going inside. This is where you calm your spirit and connect with yourself. It all begins by cultivating a lifestyle of going inside.

5. Make peace with your loneliness. There is a wounded child within each of us that needs to be recognized and embraced. Loneliness is magnified when you busy yourself with activity and neglect the pool of pain that exists within you. People try to minimize this pain by comparing their life experience with others. This only isolates the wounded child and intensifies loneliness. Coming home requires that you focus on healing your wounded child.

6. Liberate yourself from the prisons of the past. Addicts live with a vacuum inside that makes them uncomfortable connecting with others. Their wounded child has been betrayed and let down by others. They don’t trust themselves or others. Dominating their brain are mistaken beliefs that keep them inside an emotional prison. Liberation requires an act of daily forgiveness which simply means that you will not hold this egregious destructive behavior against yourself any longer. Every day you come home to yourself and make this agreement. You then walk away from destructive behavior and embrace healing and practice being helpful to others. Addicts who choose to live this way liberate themselves from loneliness effectively. They learn to use their eyes to look at others with compassion and eliminate criticism.

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