“Your experience is entirely determined by you”
Sadguru
One of the worst experiences of my life occurred my junior year of high school. I had worked all year to become the #1 scorer in my team for Academic Decathlon, a high school competition. I put in all the hours, blood, sweat, tears into my work and could not envision the competition going any other way.
Lo and behold, I didn’t reach my goal. I ended up placing at #2. And my feelings were quickly consumed by guilt and anger. I thought I had wasted a whole year for something and, along with that, was furious that I probably would never achieve my goal. I was lost where to go from there. I never even believed this would happen and it all seemed like an empty path.
An interesting change started to form though. I suddenly let go of my goals of being #1, presuming I couldn’t achieve it, and decided to pursue other avenues. I picked up hip-hop dancing which I’d always wanted to try. I took my health and fitness more seriously with exercise and clean eating. And most of all, I studied Academic Decathlon with an intent of having fun rather than beating others.
And when I didn’t focus on being #1, I suddenly became the #1 scorer in our next competition.
Learning to finally enjoy what I was doing and how I schedule my day versus trying to get ahead of others was one of the most important lessons I could ever learn. That change alone made this the best experience of my life.
Context is Everything
Our mind loves to divide reality into bits and pieces through categorization. It’s a useful tool for objective analysis. However, we often use it to create subjective perceptions. We can judge whether a certain event, person, place, etc. is positive or negative.
This mechanism can also serve a useful purpose. But the vast majority of the time, we create a bifurcation of our experiences into wholly good and bad parts. And we simply accept that we are having a poor day or something is wrong. We accept that our experience in some way can be wholly negative.
But I just went concluding an event was the worst experience of my life to the best. And all it took was putting it into the perspective of what new things it allowed me to do. If something that I had considered at the time to be my lowest point can also become the most transformative event, was it wholly negative or positive?
The truth is, it’s neither.
In the moment, I certainly could only describe the experience as negative. But now, I can describe it as a trigger for positive change and be extremely glad it happened. Either of these interpretations have nothing to do with the event itself. The former is because I cared so much about being #1. And the latter because I was able to enjoy new things I wouldn’t have otherwise.
The judgement of an event is only predicated on the context that surrounds it.
And the problem is we’ll never comprehend the whole context of anything. We end up choosing a limited view to judge reality in our mind. We’d rather split up events into positive and negative and crave the positive experiences while suffering in the negative ones. A great video that inspired this idea for me is The Farmer’s Story which I saw over on Prince EA’s channel. I’ll link it right below.
The idea is being able to let go of our conceptions of deciding something or someone is good or bad. These divisions only serve as qualifications on our well-being. As Michael Singer asks in his book The Untethered Soul, “Do you want to be happy?” The answer is likely yes. But then we qualify it by saying we want to be with this person or achieve this goal and so on.
When we are able to let go, we let experience just be and don’t fall for the trap of “negative” experiences. Then everything is just a part of the process of living.
Getting Out of the Cage
“Well that’s great and all Pardhu. But it’s not like I have control over my mind to stop this kind of thinking and judging. It just happens”.
This is true. But this point is actually a step in the direction. You don’t have control over your thoughts? That must mean you are not your thoughts. Often our thoughts take us on some journey one way or another and we just go along with it. But maybe it’s worth wondering if we can let them go on their journey while staying back. For me, there are two effective methods I’ve found to break the trap of negative experiences.
1. Just Smile
Whenever I can sense my thoughts or feelings going one way or another, I tend to just take a moment and smile. It’s not that it ends the negative state I’m in. Rather it breaks me out enough to suddenly observe and try to understand it without getting caught up in it. And it’s especially useful when our negative thoughts and labels produce even more negativity to ponder on.
Over many years I’ve found this technique extremely practical and easy to break out of most “negative” experiences. Just knowing that I’m even capable of smiling already reminds me that such an experience cannot be wholly negative. And suddenly I get curious as to what the event can reveal to me that I never knew or even thought of before.
This is a similar method that Michael Singer tries to teach in his book The Untethered Soul. When seeing something that is stirring up negative emotions, don’t try to express it or repress it, all the while damaging your experience. Simply try to observe it while letting it pass. Smiling become a powerful reframing tool to do this
2. Be More Aware
This is one that’s much harder to develop, but works the most effectively. I’ve only been able to see the benefits of this recently with my 10 day meditation course. Being aware of the experience that you are having is a powerful perspective to have because you start to realize that it is all within you.
Sadguru gives a great example of this in his book Inner Engineering. Imagine that someone holds your hand. How would you describe the way their hand feels? Hot or cold? Rough or smooth? You might come up with many adjectives to describe what their hand is like.
But the truth is, you don’t know what their hand is like at all. All you are aware of is what your hand feels like in reaction to their hand. When you understand this, you understand that all experience is within you. What you see, hear, touch, smell, taste all arises within you in reaction and has nothing to do with labeling anything outside. Taking this understanding, you can also let go of the negative labels we apply to things around us.
I believe becoming more aware can be one of the most powerful things we can do to overcome our negative experiences. It certainly takes time and practice through meditation or other techniques, but it is well worth the effort.
Removing Labels
Hopefully I’ve been able to convince you that the labels we apply to the world of good and bad are just mental structures that are limiting our full happiness. Finding ways to remove them is a powerful step to take to real peace.
Are there any methods you use to overcome your “negative” experiences? If so, let me know in the comments or reach out to me via Instagram and Facebook below. I’d be interested in learning what has helped others.
If you’d like to read the books that inspired this article, here are my affiliate links to The Untethered Soul and Inner Engineering. These two books have been/are the biggest spiritual influences on my life.
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