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Sometime during my adolescence I felt my identity as a carefree boy being challenged. Nothing extreme, just occasional negative thoughts, self doubts, perhaps a tinge of fatalism.
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| ILLUSTRATION: Dreamstime |
Part of it was, of course, simply being a teenager. I was experiencing feelings typical of this difficult stage: worries about fitting in, embarrassment over everything my parents did or didn’t do, frustration that I was neither a
child any more nor quite yet an adult.
But there was also something just a bit more sinister, a kind of low-grade dread. Of what, I wasn't sure. Maybe there was some dark secret my family was keeping from me.
By no means did this ruin my life; I was still generally a happy, healthy, functioning teenager. But it did have an effect, inhibiting my social life, I’m sure, and giving voice to a kind of self-defeating alter ego. I just had this vague sense that something stood between me and the full happiness I imagined was possible.
Most of the time I wasn’t even conscious of these feelings at a level I could have described, much less that I thought anyone else might notice. I just figured they were normal, that everyone felt that way.
Those hazy, dark thoughts, that elusive doubt, continued to weigh on my spirit well into my adult life.
Why do you always have that
dark cloud over your head?
DIAGNOSIS!
When I was about 40 I had an epiphany. It occurred during a meeting of my men’s group.* That night, in our continuing effort to understand each other and challenge ourselves to grow, we were doing an exercise called simply “feedback.” **
Each of us got a handful of three-by-five cards. We were to write down for each of the other men an observation about him. No judgments, no criticisms, just an observation. We could either sign our cards or remain anonymous.
The first card handed to me—signed by Peter, a man I admired very much for his courage and insight—read: “Jeff, why do you always have that dark cloud over your head?”
The consequences of that question have been profound. The immediate impact was a sense of relief, perhaps like that felt by a patient finally getting clarity after suffering for years with some undiagnosed illness.
Finding out that it has a name, that it’s not all in your head, at last lets you address the problem and start doing something about it.
All this time I’d managed to keep my little affliction stuffed into an uneasy little corner of my psyche, figuring that’s just the way life is. Finally I knew that it might not be normal after all, and, more significant to me, that everyone else could see it.
Either I’d keep entertaining this unwanted guest
in my house, or I’d put out the “No Vacancy” sign.
CLEANING HOUSE
The very next day, finally seeing my little burden as others could see it, I began cleaning house, realizing that each time I became aware of my defeatist self talk I’d have a decision to make: either keep entertaining this unwanted guest in my house, or put out the “No Vacancy” sign.
In a sort of self-styled Zen, I started working to detach from expectation and the illusion of control. I chose to feel good, not bad. Gradually, I reclaimed my sense of completeness and rediscovered the lightness of being I’d known as a boy.
Now, lightness of being doesn’t mean one is always happy. It means that, even when all’s not going well, when you’re in pain or sorrow, you acknowledge those hurts, but don’t let them define you. You look for gratitude to supplant expectations. You take it easy on yourself and find humor in your imperfection.
A MANTRA
One thing that’s really helped is my new mantra. I guess I’ve always believed in it intuitively. But I’ve only called on it regularly since the traumatic confluence of disasters that have piled up on the world over the past decade or so. And since I’ve started encountering the many personal physical and emotional challenges of growing old.
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| IMAGE: Genuine Tibetan Arts |
So when I find myself especially overwrought about the state of my life or of the world, that’s when I invoke it: If there’s something, anything, I can do about it right now, do it. If not, let it go.
The things triggering them literally do not exist.
PAST, TENSE
To clear my skies of the dark cloud it’s also helped considerably to identify which tense my self talk is using to discourage me. And, if that tense is either past or future, not to listen to a word of it.
As the gifted spiritual guru Eckhart Tolle teaches, the past has already happened; it no longer exists. The future hasn’t happened; it doesn’t yet exist. The only time that does exist is the here and now.
I spend lots of time thinking about those tenses, trying to fully realize that emotions like expectation, fear, regret, dread and guilt are pretty useless considering that the things triggering them literally do not exist.
AND YOU?
So do you have a dark cloud? An inner voice that blocks out the sunshine of your spirit? We’d love to hear how you’ve come to recognize the encumbrance and how you manage it. Jot your reflection in "Comments" below.
* My men’s group, founded to challenge ourselves and each other to be more thoughtful, more loving—more evolved—human beings, has been meeting more or less every two weeks since 1977. Forty-seven years!
** We were fortunate to have two members of our group who were organizational development professionals. They provided many thoughtful team-building, consciousness-expanding and communication exercises. Among them, the “car wash,” where each week one member had to sit and be “washed” with compliments from the rest of us; a ropes course, which forced us to recognize and apply each member’s unique strengths to bring the whole group through a series of physical challenges; and taking the The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) test to explore our respective personality types and how they colored our relationships with each other.
“I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.”
LOUISA MAY ALCOTT
