The Work of Coming Home to Yourself
I think that our human core is basic goodness.
OUR BASIC NATURE IS GOODNESS
Here’s what I believe to be true:
I like to think that every human being is good at the core, and wants to do good.
That’s the real deep-down bottom line. That’s home. And I do believe this is originally true for every single human being. Yes, some make it quite difficult to see through their acts.
And some humans do seem to be far-removed from their loving core.
How come?
When growing up, we are all destined to experience some hurt, shame, or other painful events.
They are an unavoidable part of life.
And they are not inherently the problem.
We have the power to recover from painful experiences and to stay open to life.
Our in-born human emotions and nervous systems are designed to support us in that.
Emotions help us digest and recover from painful experiences.
In a sense, they are natural waves of energy to restore us to equilibrium and goodness.
If during or after a painful event we are safe and supported to fully-experience adequate emotional reaction(s), we will likely recover better, and the scarring will likely be less drastic.
But that is very often not the case.
Many caretakers, out of ignorance, don’t support healthy emotional self-regulation.
Showing anger, fear, sadness or just shaking uncontrollably is often discouraged.
Or worse, these natural and healing bodily reactions were actively inhibited, shamed, or punished.
In that case, we will develop a stronger need for protection from future events.
Here is a simple example:
If you are little and your beloved pet dies, this is a painful experience. Sadness is the built-in reaction and remedy for us to deal with loss. If you are supported to be sad, and to grieve, and perhaps be angry that animals die, you will eventually get over the loss. You will likely be open for a new loving connection to arise again one day, with another animal.
But if your parents told you that “it’s not that bad”, or “boys don’t cry”, or gave you other messages that didn’t support the wave of sadness, the painful experience will not be digested too well. And you will likely begin to protect yourself from having similar painful experiences.
Maybe you will not allow yourself to love another pet again like this one.
BUILDING A DEFENCE
So it’s not just hurtful experiences that we want to protect ourselves from.
We also want to protect ourselves from our inability to cope emotionally.
If we are unable to cope with a painful experience, naturally, we want to avoid having similar experiences in the future. And that’s when we build barriers and stray from our core.
Let’s say we build protective layers.
These layers are a combination of (mostly unconscious) physical holding patterns or tensions in the body and accompanying thoughts (or beliefs) that shape our mindset and ego identity.
Let’s get back to our example from earlier:
To avoid feeling sad, we needed to contract our body and close-down the channels to our emotional core. This will come with accompanying, protective thoughts like “I am just not an emotional person” or “I am tough, and love is for suckers”.
This helps to prevent us from being hurt in similar ways in the future.
But we also disconnect ourselves from our loving core. And we invest a lot of energy into keeping-up and fortifying our defences.
We often create very static characters for our definitions of ourselves, and carry a lot of armour in the forms of attitudes, beliefs and tension.
That is when life begins to seem like a drag, that we somehow just have to survive our life.
WAKING-UP FROZEN EMOTIONS
Whenever a human being experiences contraction, I think there have to be at least two emotions present: fear and anger. Fear because you would not contract if you were not scared. And anger because you probably don’t like that you had to contract to begin with.
And there is also likely sadness for having lost contact with your core.
Of course, in reality this is complex, highly personal and idiosyncratic to every being.
What I want to underline, though, is this:
The natural human state is one of goodness and kindness and relaxed presence. If we experience life in a very different way to this over a long period of time, we lost contact with our core. This is likely due to painful yet unresolved imprints of events, leaving us with frozen emotions that simmer underneath our masks.
TRANSFORMATION WILL TOUCH SOME PAIN
To me, Radical Honesty is a journey back home to a state of greater presence, love, and awareness.
Now, if we want to come home to our natural state, we will have to pass through ourselves. It can’t be positive vibes only. Along the road, you will have to intentionally experience the limitations of your current character.
This means going inwards and back through your own defences, blocked emotions and the impulses behind your image. Here you inevitably encounter that which wasn’t complete on an emotional level.
I’ll even go as far as to say:
If you don’t contact any fear or anger or grief, you are digging in the wrong places.
Loving awareness, presence, and real kindness are not new things to learn. You already have the resources. How can you learn what you already are at the core?
Radical Honesty is the work of undoing the protective layers you have build around that core. It involves staying in contact with how you contract, and, literally, re-sourcing yourself.
Moment-by-moment, you communicate from the closest place you know to your core. And with practice, you come to speak directly from it, your true home.
Reignite Your Zest for Life
On burning yourself out… and on how to start another fire.
Hey there. This is Marvin. What you are about to read here is my personal experience. This is not a scientific paper. I’m not sharing a medical opinion. I write this from my heart and with love for my fellow humans.
And I hope my words here will reach those people burning themselves out by doing all the wrong things for all the right reasons, just like me. And inspire them to do the work to reignite their zest for life.
Down and out…
My friends said I should be happy. My mom was proud. My university in Germany used me as the poster child: the first student landing an auditing job in New York’s investment banking world. I wanted more.
More approval. Growth. I kept pushing forward. Studied more.
Went to China, Mexico, and South Africa. Then back to New York.
I chased what I read somewhere was the dream, and tried to make it mine.
At only 26, things came crashing down for me.
Every day, I felt more lonely and isolated. Unreal. My thoughts attacked me, all the time. I was stuck inside some surreal world that had no connection to present reality. I felt like I was in a goldfish bowl, unable to jump out. I spoke through fake, role-playing masks, hiding my true thoughts, all the time.
Until, one day, I broke down.
There were several mini-breakdowns before. Little warnings here and there. I did not notice them. I was too busy trying to make an impression. On this day, I collapsed. Physically. I lay on the ground, unable to move.
My young body gave up. It pulled the emergency brake.
As I lay there, I cursed myself for being weak.
In retrospect, this day marked a turning point and I am eternally thankful to my body.
I had overridden my body's wisdom for so long, and now my body was finally beginning to override my mind.
I kept fighting against myself for three more months in New York:
“This is right for you. Stay. What else would you do? Just wait until summer. Wait until the next raise.”
Then, with my last strength, I pulled the parachute.
I quit my job, packed, and moved back to my parent’s house, dealing with the hangovers of a decade-long character bender.
Fake it til you break it.
In our faced-past, hyperconnected, capital-driven world
…many human beings are living-out a disembodied role that does not suit them.
That means they work very hard at being a certain way. Portraying an ideal picture.
This can be some ideal we picked up somewhere along the way.
A problem comes in if this ideal we want to portray is in direct conflict with our current reality.
Simple example:
If I feel sad and I want to be seen as happy, I have to invest a lot of energy. I have to tense up to repress the true feeling of the moment. And I have to invest even more to pretend. I work twice as hard for a dubious payoff. That’s because most people can tell something is off anyways. Who are you really fooling?
That’s right.
We might be able to pretend for a while, but long-term “faking til you make it” wears us down. It costs a whole lot of aliveness and creative energy. And we are doing this for someone else’s idea of how we should be.
We are sensing, feeling, living organisms before we are the idea we have of ourselves & our job role.
If we think our body is the one who got it wrong, we are in for a lesson.
I know some people who:
Pride themselves in not having time to eat
Want their minds to live in a literal machine
Compete over who can sleep less
Think cheating on partners is normal
Would never leave a meeting to pee
Say emotions are for little girls
I was the person sitting at a desk until midnight because I did not want to leave first.
The level of disembodiment in the modern workplace is shocking and, sadly, normalised.
And the only only beneficiaries are Pharma Inc. and Rehab Co.
At the core of this is us trying to live up to inhumane standards and expectations…
… and justifying them as necessary to “make a living” and “pay the bills”.
We got the money, and we don’t know how wealth feels.
Here is how I like to view Burn-Out
Burn-out is the continuous fight against your inborn human nature.
It’s not an external force, it’s the killing of your unique life flame.
An inside job, so to speak.
I worked so hard on trying to be someone I was not, that my body gave up.
What burned me out was not the work itself.
It was the additional hard work I did of performing a phoney role, all the time.
It was the constant pretending that I was an “accounting-enthusiast” when in reality, I wanted to be outside. Climb mountains. Go to Ecuador. I burned myself out by keeping a lid on the natural and healthy reactions my body had to unnatural and unhealthy ways of being.
I doused my own flames with the thousand “Yeses” that wanted to be “Nos”.
All the times I force-smiled when I wanted to hide and cry.
And all the times I forced myself to open the office door when I wanted to run away.
Have you ever seen a candle’s flame slowly dying under a glass?
For me, burn-out was like that.
I extinguished my own flame under a thick, self-made glass of
Pretenses and lies
On-going role-play that went against my body
Performing in ways I learned in books
Repressing feelings
Micro-managing other’s opinions of me
Analyzing every thought I had
Burn-out is the on-going dimming of your own fire…
… until it goes out.
You are temporarily unavailable. Mailer demon. Out of office.
Reigniting the flame…
Luckily, I was not at the end of my candle.
Far from it. Today, I am more energised at 36 than I ever was in my twenties.
In all areas of my life, I am thriving…
… and I am doing so much more than I did.
The flame of life, luckily, is self-reigniting. By default, it wants to burn and blaze with other flames. Flames are like that. They want to flicker and dance and flare-up and glow together. My work was to recognise all the ways in which I stopped my natural burning. All the ways I stifled my flame.
Burn-out was doing all the wrong things for the right reasons.
I had to go back, clean out my past, and reconnect to what I really wanted.
The biggest challenges for me were…
Learning to say “No”
Knowing and saying what I want
Expressing so-called negative feelings
Without these three skills, I dare to say you are going to suffer.
And here is the big question.
How am I doing financially?
Today, I have more money than I ever had working in jobs I hated.
I don’t have to compensate all that much.
Simplicity is King – The Complexity Bias
In the long run, simplicity trumps sophistication!
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” - Albert Einstein
Most people, past me included, have picked up the notion that good things have to be difficult. We don’t value what comes easy. Feel like we don’t deserve what we don’t work hard for.
Over the past years, I learned how to write electronic music using only my computer. Countless times, I found myself with a really good idea after just one or two sessions. And then, my complexity bias kicked in, mixed with a bit of imposter syndrome:
“This can’t be good. You only worked 6 hours on the lead!”
“This is too easy. You need to work-in more intricacy!”
“There are too few plug-ins used, this sounds too dry!”
“You have not written enough music to write anything good!”
So I went back to the track and began complicating things. Weeks later, the arrangement looked like a motherboard from a NASA computer. The effects chain was long and complex (I sometimes could no longer tell what was going on) The original melody was butchered.
I played the track to my dad, who worked in music all his life:
“That’s really intelligent and all, but I don’t think I could dance to that.”
Until this day, my most celebrated track took me three days to write.
Do you make things harder than they have to be?
If you do, you are not alone. As proud owners of a human mind, we all have to deal with the insidious whispers from within. A mind loves complications, challenges, and that which it does not have. Life itself does not care. Your heart beats itself. Breathing is effortless.
For the mind, life is hard because it’s easy!
Here is a pattern many people follow (adapted from Robert Fritz):
Start something you want to do
Make it harder than it has to be
Lose interest in doing it
Convince yourself that it was not what you actually wanted
What’s at the core of making things harder?
I think it’s plain and simple fear. Fear that has many surface-level shapes:
Fear of not being good enough
Fear of being called a fraud
Fear of not being special enough
Fear of being criticised by normal people
And the biggest one:
Fear of simple success and your own power.
As Marianne Williamson put it:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Simplicity trumps sophistication
In my twenties, I wanted to get better at dating. I studied from the self-proclaimed seduction masters on the internet. I developed a complex model of how the “process” had to be, that I neatly divided into different phases. For each phase, I had a handful of pre-planned things I could say. I had rehearsed techniques. My model was sophisticated.
And, besides being draining, it also didn’t work.
Reality is always simpler than we make it out to be in our minds.
What worked in the end was simple human contact.
Ultimately, I think sophistication is a protection from uncomfortable feelings in our bodies. And once we learn to tolerate simple physical sensations, we don’t have to hide behind layers of complexity.
We make things hard because we are secretly afraid of getting what we (think we) want.
There is more to say on this, but for today, I want to leave it here.
