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Sometimes Healing Hurts, Pt. 2

May 1, 2018 by Claire Fitzpatrick

“May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
May the rain fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.”

— An Irish Blessing, author unknown

 

My aunt was a nun.  She was Sister Theresa Fitzpatrick, from Garden City, Long Island (New York).

As a child, and into adulthood, I knew her as Aunt Rita.

Aunt Rita once gave my family a wall plaque with that prayer on it.

I used to stare at it and consider it, thinking that it was a beautiful wish, created by a beautiful someone among my cherished ancestry who had a flair for poetry.

The Irish love their poetry

As a child and a young teenager, I fell in love with the English language, and started to write every chance I got.

It made me feel connected to the Earth and her creatures, to God and to mankind.

As a budding young writer, I became a keen observer; and as I observed, I became aware of that which is not pleasant in human nature.

And as I later researched what I observed, I realized horrible truths that the Bible did not immediately reveal to me, but became self-evident upon observation:

That mankind was both God and The Devil, that we chose to act the way of The Devil, and that, because of our tendency for greed, visciousness, apathy, fear, and cruelty, we were making Hell out of paradise here on Earth.

I began to see my writing as a mission. I was going to be a great novelist, a great poet, a great playwright…my words were going to move the masses of sleepy destroyers into woke (before that was a thing) saviors of humanity and our planetary home.

It was all about communication

But as I passed into high school, as a nerdy, cerebral, emotional teen, I experienced cruelty, shunning, viciousness and apathy from my peers and adults outside my home.

My optimism for my and our collective future waned.

Truthfully, the only reason I did not commit suicide in those days was the Catholic belief that that there was something worse beyond this planet for those who took their own life. So later, when I no longer counted myself among those who call themselves Catholic, my faith system served its purpose for me at the time.

Instead, I searched for ways to “get in front of death.”  I drank, I smoked, I took drugs. I took unnecessary risks with my mind and my body.

I hung out with angry, violent societal misfits who were frustrated like me, but more on a micro level. Their home lives and careers were their hell, so I felt like at least on that level, I had it better than them.

That would change.

My anger became both micro and macro.  It turns out, when you hang out with people who give up on their loved ones, chances are, you lose faith in loved ones, too.

As I grew older, as an angsty teenager and a frustrated adult, I kept Aunt Rita’s plaque above my door out of a strange sense of loyalty to the child in me who once who saw beauty in those words.

But I would scoff at them as I passed under it to face another day of disappointment in life. I thought them fairy tale wishes, from a people who feasted on fairy tales, who were beaten into submission, almost to extinction, by centuries of usurpers who had nothing but contempt for my people, usurpers who had other ideas for the innocent.

The wounded Irish, the wounded me

Still, my inner child still wanted the beauty. She still believed, somehow, that life could be beautiful.

She was still alive, and she wanted to live.

And as I moved into my twenties, I tried to reclaim the passion for life and my dreams of poetry that I once had.

But,

The road seemed long and seemed to move farther away.
The wind seemed to push against my chest.
The sun seemed to burn my face if I dared to turn it upward.
The rain seemed either rare, or flooded my dry fields.
When I met those who loved me, I turned away.
God was a lie. I was on my own.

Fear breeds lonliness

For a long time, I shunned a life of service. I abandoned hope, so I created my own hell.

I became that which I feared most: angry, resentful, poor in spirit and home, and afraid.

All the time, afraid.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Because the mind follows the body, and the body follows the mind.

I ended up with pain from my reckless lifestyle, and that’s how I found chiropractic.

And that’s how chiropractic found me.

Moving from a pain model to a healing model

I was a pain patient for years before I realized that chiropractic was helping connect me to my inner child again, helping her cry out for life, helping her claw for hope.

This has not been an easy, nor a fast, healing process.

My home and career life fell apart three separate times before I decided to take a right-hand turn and become a chiropractic student.

I became a chiropractic student, and then a chiropractic doctor, long before I realized that my career choice was helping me heal myself, and that with every adjustment I received AND delivered, I was reconnecting my spirit with my body.

Only happy while serving is not enough

For a long time, the only time I was happy was when I was learning how to help others through chiropractic care.

Later, the only time I was happy was when I was serving through chiropractic.

But I still struggled for years with anxiety and the health consequenses to my body and life, and therefore, to my family and community.

Reclaiming my health one adjustment at a time

It has only been in the last few years I have begun to reclaim my inner and outer health, and the beauty I once saw in the world. It has only been in these last few years that I have been able to see through the clouds of my hopelessness to my own power and purpose.

Now, on this May Day 2018, I emerged from the Metro to a cold, windy, rainy Amsterdam day.

It was a short, inviting trek along the road to my office.
The wind was at my back, merrily quickening my pace.
The sun shines in my smile at my day ahead
The rain is falling softly on these fields ahead of me
My inner child and my wiser self are walking side by side
God is in my healing hands, and I am in Hers.

I was, and am, still healing.

I still see the mysery. I see it more, actually.

But thanks to years of reconnecting my nervous system with my physiology, I have reconnected to something I lost a long time ago.

I have faith.  I have hope. I have joy. I have love.

Because of this, I have reclaimed a great deal of my physical and mental health.

You are not alone. Neither am I.

In my office, I see in others the hell that I created for myself on a micro level.

They walk into my office with shoulder pain, with low back pain, with neck pain. Of course.

They also walk in with flawed neural patterning that began years and years ago, when something happend in their lives that they couldn’t integrate.

Maybe it was abuse. Maybe it was sorrow, disappointment, or the terrible realization that life is not what they thougth is should be.

If we are lucky…

If they are lucky, their imbalance expresses itself in pain, and they find the right help.

The pain is a cry for help. It is a sign that your neural system is not firing properly, that there is improper feed to your body due to a buildup of stress.

Chiropractic helps you repattern your body and mind so that our bodies AND our minds are more flexible, more adaptable, more able to heal properly.

But sometimes healing hurts.

Many times, we think that if our pain goes away, we are healed, and that the goal of their chiropractic care is to go back to our desperate lives, pain free at least.

But they sometimes find something else. They sometimes hurt more after an adjustment.

Awareness brings consequences.  As we heal, as our brains reconnect with our bodies, we can sometimes become aware that there is a bigger problem than the pain.

Awareness also brings us choices.

We now have a chance to face life full on, with awareness of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful.

Many cannot stomach this awareness right away, and blame everyone and everything for the way they respond to their inner and outer environment.

We must be patient with ourselves and others during this healing process.  While we must ultimately take responsibility for our choices, while we are subluxated (i.e., in a state of less light, less awareness, inflexibilty, inadaptability, holding nerve system interference), we often cannot make the right choices right away.

While we are subluxated, our ability to access our full capacity is still limited.

We must be gentle with ourselves while healing

We musn’t be hard on ourselves during the healing process, just as we musn’t be unduly harsh to others during this time.

It’s the people who are “painless,” who are disconnected from their bodies, yet who have a sense of dis-ease and dissatisfaction with their lives who are often the most dangerous to themselves and those around them.

Pain as a blessing

People who have pain symptoms at least have the blessings of awareness.  There is a chance at reorganizing their patterning. But this patterning happened over a lifetime. We must have faith in the process and give ourselves the love we need to heal.

It also gives us the chance to grow in ways that we would never have been aware of without the pain.

We need inner connection desperately. That’s what chiropractic offers us.

The state of the profession

Chiropractic has earned the dubious reputation as a pain-reducing modality.

That’s because, sometimes healing reduces pain, and it looks like chiropractic is doing that.

It is actually you that is doing that.

Chiropractic is just helping your nervous system reorganize so that you can do that.

Early on, on a professional level, we lost our way.

Without going into too much history, almost form the beginning, we had egoistic infighting.

We lost faith in one another

Because we lost faith in one another, we allowed our environment — in this case, other health professionals and insurance companies — to define us.

Because of this, many of us, myself included, were and are confused as to the true benefits of what we deliver.

That’s why our messaging is often so confusing.

We are still subluxated as a profession.

Yet, with each adjustment to our profession, with each voice within us communicating the truth, we gain strength in the system that is chiropractic.

When we understand the power of the chirorpactic adjustment, when we start to have faith that we are helping facilitate healing on a profound level, we are better able to communicate with others the real promise of chiropractic.

When we do this, others respond with the innate wisdom that they need this.

The state of the world

On the supermacro level, our planet is crying out in pain. Animals are crying out in pain. Plants, rivers, mountains, are crying out in pain.

Our planet is responding like a body in a dis-ease state.  She’s running a temperature. She is raising her immune system defenses (methane, ancient microbes, new, complex viruses) in order to destroy a pathogen that threatens all her life systems.

In this case, the pathogen is a cancer, a set of cells that is in runaway expansion, that is aggresively and recklessly using up all of the resources that she has evolved over the millenia  that sustain life for the whole.

Guess what — or who — that pathogen is?

The state of humanity

Humanity is crying out in pain. We are cruel with one another and with ourselves. We are in denial of our sickness, and lash out angrily when confronted.

However, thankfully, we are finally waking to the realization of what we are doing, and how we can can repair the damage to ourselves and our posterity.

There is no more time to not know what chiropractic can do for us.  We have to get in front of this crisis now.

Chiropractic is crucial to this process

Chiropractic care is essential to this process of healing.

We have to heal ourselves now so that we have the inner capacity to heal our planetary home.

We have to face who we are, what we are, and our power now.  We have to wield our power wisely now.

Wisdom — healing — sometimes hurts. The pain is sometimes a necessary aspect of our evolution.

Chiropractic is an essential tool for speeding up this healing process, and helping us evolve into the creatures that we need to be in order to fix this hell that we have collectively created.

What ever happened to Aunt Rita?

You know, I never really knew my Aunt Rita well. She lived hundreds of kilometers away from me. I only ever saw her on summer holidays or at weddings.

But my Aunt Rita lived a life of service, one in which she cared for hundreds of children nad families in the school systems and churches of Garden City. She touched many lives whom I only know from witnessing the staggeringly long line of mourners that wrapped around the block of the school gymnasium in which her wake was held.

Aunt Rita died of skin cancer in 1998.

She she didn’t know she had it until pain got in the way of her service. By the time she felt pain, it was already too late for conventional medicine to help her.

In the absence of pain we must be vigilant

Maybe if chiropractic care played an additional role in her life, she would still be here today to serve.

It’s a question that is academic at this point; however, knowning what I know now, I have a pretty good idea that she would.

Now you know like I know

But I didn’t yet know that each chiropractic adjustment builds on the last to help the brain reorganize its patterning in order to give the mind and body the energy and resources to heal and evolve.

But now I do. And you do, too.

Spread the word, the love, and get checked and adjusted. Today.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Thoughts and Opinions Tagged With: beauty, chiropractic, environment, failure, faith, fear, healing, health, health insurance, humanity, knowledge, love, natural, opioid addiction, organic, philosophy, poetry, rage, science, success, toxic, wisdom

How are you stepping into your 2018 goals? Start with last year’s

December 12, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

How are you stepping into your 2018 goals? Start with last year’s.

Most experts say that we quit our New Years’ resolutions (NYRs) within the month of January.  I think we place a lot of weight – no pun intended – on January 1 being the start of our “whole new me.”  Our bodies don’t really know that it’s January 1. It’s just another day to our health.

So right now it’s mid-December. We’re starting to negotiate with ourselves.

“I’m going to park myself beside this chocolate fountain because starting January 1, it’s a whole new me.”

“I’ll cut back on dairy and grains after January 1 because I’m going to so many family dinners that I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

Or even…

“I’m going to join the gym on January 1, but I’m going to start January 15 because it’s going to be so crowded in the first two weeks because of NYRs and I don’t want anyone to see me.”

Look at that last one. WE KNOW that NYRs fail! Yet we still make them! We are the most clever, talented, heartfelt, creative, emotional, and illogical beasts on the planet!

Okay. I’m not going to fight this particular tide. But what I am going to do is to make a suggestion:  If you want to know how to stick to your NYRs this year, you have to start with two things: your “why,” and last year.

Look backward.

Que the time machine. Look back to this time in December of 2016.  Besides the obvious sociopolitical changes (don’t look back at the politics right now; you’re going to turn to salt!), you had an ideal for yourself that you were going to go get!

Did you?

What were your wins?

Mark down your successes. What were your goals for 2017 that you actually made happen? Type or write them down.  What were you able to tick off your list?  What changes did you create that actually came to pass?

Once you get this down, make an inventory of the conditions, both inner and outer, that allowed this change for yourself. How did you do it? Where did you find the strength to make it happen? Who helped you? What helped you?

Now think about these wins. How do they make you feel when you think about them? Accomplished? Proud? Draw on that good feeling and use it for setting your goals for 2018.

Write this down: Success breeds success. The feelings the success you have over the accomplishments of this past year is crucial to creating your success in 2018.

What did you not do?

Take a look at what goals that you failed to accomplish in 2017.

Take a good, loving, honest look at them.

Did you fail because you just stopped trying? Did you set them too big? Did you believe that they could happen? Did they feel too hard to do, or did you feel like you weren’t up to the task?

Maybe it was something else. Did something change in your world that had to take priority? Were you faced with challenges that called your energy away from the task you set for yourself before the challenge?

Maybe it wasn’t time.

Maybe your innate intelligence told you that the goals you didn’t accomplish in 2017 were goals that actually had to be put aside until the proper time.

Maybe you had to take care of a health challenge before you could take on the goal you set for yourself. It might be that you did the right thing by putting it off.  Maybe you and your body just wasn’t ready this year.

In any case, if you are quiet and really give yourself time to listen to that inner voice, your inner voice will be honest with you. Your innate intelligence will deliver the truth if you give it the honor it needs to speak to your inner self.

When you finally come up with the answers, write them them down so you can look at them. This will help you clarify how to craft your goals for 2018, and help you look for pitfalls to your future success.

Above all else, be patient with yourself.

Adopting a lifestyle in which you honor your body and spirit takes mental practice. You can’t be expected to learn to play the piano in two weeks. Give yourself the emotional room to make an honest commitment to your goals.

Have a blessed holiday week!

Filed Under: Health and Fitness Tagged With: aging, beauty, chiropractic, failure, faith, fear, hair care, healing, health, knowledge, longevity, love, meditation, wisdom

A Lesson For Us All

August 26, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

The following story illustrates one of two huge reasons why it’s hard to change our eating habits:

  • We talk ourselves into believing we are addicted to them.
  • We actually are physically addicted to them.

In this blog post, I am going to address #1.  I’ll address #2 in a future blog post.

Food is an easy comfort.

All we do is reach for it and consume it.

Food becomes a reward we give ourselves for putting up with, and making it through, yet another dissatisfying day.

it’s the same attachment that some of us have with alcohol and drugs.

To ask ourselves to give up our eating habits is asking us to give up the one pleasure that we allow ourselves.

We are so attached to that addiction that we actually tell ourselves that our eating habit is our choice, and we actually embrace the addiction.

We submit.

We succumb.

We release the struggle for a better way, and we accept — for better and for worse — the way we have.

I want to tell you a story.

It is a terrible story.

Last week, a man I know lost his girlfriend to heart disease.

She was not obese. She was not “obviously” ill.

She was relatively young, she was financially successful, and she died — shockingly and instantly — in her lover’s arms.

Let me fill in the details.

I’m going to change the names.  We’ll call him Paul.  We’ll call her  Joyce.

Paul is 43 years old. He is an acquaintance.

He is in the “acquaintance” camp because he’s kind of unbearable.

He’s judgmental. He makes ugly jokes that are designed to hurt, then he says he didn’t mean anything by it.

He’s sneaky. If he can get away with manipulating a situation to his benefit, he will.

He talks about people behind their back, and then when that person is in front of him, he will shower that person with praise.

We all have our stories…

He has a story about that. He suffered abuse at the hands of an ex-spouse, who took everything – his money, his child, his dignity – and moved to another state.

Since then, he’s become a bit unbearable.

Don’t get me wrong. I am sympathetic.  However, that doesn’t mean that I am willing to suffer his abuse.

So I don’t.

About two years ago, Paul re-met an old lover of his from his college years, Joyce.

Joyce had her own story.

She was smart – too smart for her life choices.

She had once worked as an editor for her local newspaper. The newspaper was purchased and went in a direction in which she didn’t agree, so she moved on.

Eventually, she got a job that paid very well but was extremely unrewarding.  She was the director of a bunch of managers at a company whose mission she disagreed with.

She made a lot of money but was never satisfied with her life.

She had had long-term lovers but never married. She was sensitive about what people thought about her, but she didn’t hesitate to tell others what she thought they were doing wrong with their lives.

If you tried to engage her in discussion, she accused you of being insulting. If you tried to respond to one of her criticisms, she told you that you were being defensive.

Joyce and Paul had one thing in common.  Food.

They each had allergies. He has allergies to dairy and wheat. She had allergies to nuts and legumes.  For their allergies, they listened to their respective doctors and were on a great deal of many different drugs.

They also both hated vegetables and they both loved sugar.

So, they spent a great deal of their time and energy together searching for and sharing sugary, starchy foods that met their allergic profiles. When they ate meat, it was processed meat, as cheap as they could find.

That’s actually quite a niche, isn’t it? That’s not easy – finding sugary, starchy foods that are dairy free, wheat free, nut free, and legume free, while at the same time avoiding fresh vegetables. That takes effort!

Neither smoked; that’s one good thing.

However, neither exercised. They didn’t even like to walk around the neighborhood. They drove to the corner store.

They complained of this ache and that ache, of this or that trip to the doctor.

They complained that the doctor could never “find anything,” and would take the pain killers that were prescribed.

But, whenever I tried to tentatively suggest natural, lifestyle changes in answer to Paul’s complaints, he would chuckle at me and say, “I know that’s what you do for a living, but I don’t want to be bothered; and sorry, but I just don’t believe in that stuff.”

So, we didn’t see much of Paul after he started dating Joyce.  When they were together at a party or a function, we chatted politely for a few minutes and moved on.

On the few times we saw Paul when they weren’t together, Paul would grumble about Joyce.

He would complain and tell unflattering stories about her habits.  Afterward, he would declare, “Well, it doesn’t matter. She’s as good as I’m getting. But I’m sure as hell never getting married again. She can forget that!”

It is difficult being close to people like that. It is not emotionally rewarding.

Time went on.

I haven’t seen Paul – or Joyce – for the better part of a year.

Last week, it was reported to me that Paul and Joyce were in the kitchen, putting together a meal.  According to Paul, they were having an argument. “Nothing out of the ordinary,” he reported. “We were just pecking at each other, you know,” when she stopped short and grabbed her chest.

He ran to her and caught her in his arms, just as she was falling.  They both tumbled to the floor.

She died in his arms.

She was 42.

Friends say that Paul is a wreck right now.

The last thing I understand he said to a group of people he visited was, “I wasn’t very nice to her. I wish I had treated her better.”

Was it her eating habits that killed her?

Given that she had seen doctors on multiple occasions to get evaluated for “serious diseases,” I could guess yes.

But I would hazard a more nuanced guess that her eating habits were only part of the story.

You see, food habits, like any habit that hurts us, are symptoms of bigger problems.

Those problems are inside.  They require self-reflection and a willingness to see oneself honestly.

So, the way we relate to food is often a reflection of the way we feel about the way we live.

You never know when the result of a life not-well-lived it’s going to happen.  But in retrospect, you can always say that you saw it coming.

You never know when you’re going to die, but you can often have a direct influence on its length and quality by intentionally living well.

I am 51.  These things are becoming very clear to me in my own life.

As Claire Fitzpatrick, private citizen, I have been to too many funerals of forty- and fifty-something friends and acquaintances to not notice these patterns.

As a chiropractor and nutritionist

I have seen people turn themselves around.

It is the most gratifying thing in the world to know that I have been a small part of their successes.

However, when I have a patient in my office who wants something I don’t offer – a “quick fix” – someone I can’t reach, someone who is a lot like Paul or Joyce, I shake my head and sadly move on.

I can’t help anyone who doesn’t really want help.

I can’t “walk the walk” for them.

Sometimes, the patient isn’t like Paul or Joyce.

Sometimes, the patient is someone who lives with, and takes abuse from, people like Paul and Joyce — someone who has no kind, loving support.

Sometimes, the patient is sweet, giving, lovely, shy, and lonely. Food is their intimate friend.

Sometimes, the patient is sad, depressed, anxious, and suspicious; someone who want to believe in themselves but ultimately sabotages themselves with excessive food (and, very often, with drink).

Sometimes, they want something better for themselves, but they don’t try.

Or, when they do try, when it becomes emotionally difficult to sustain the effort (as it always does), they lack the will to continue and they quit.

These are the cases that break my heart.

I have all kinds of tools to give. I can show how to use them.

For instance, as of this writing, I am hosting a 28-Day Rapid Reset Challenge (click here for details).

But ultimately, any tool I offer will fail if it is not used.

 

I’m not a psychologist.

I am a chiropractor.  I’m sort of a “neuropsychologist” for the body.

However, I do work with psychologists, and I recommend them often. We tend to see a lot of the same people.

You know, I have seen this over and over: Physical pain is worse when we have emotional pain.

Pain — physical and emotional — is frightening and isolating, and so it often becomes part of one’s self-identity.

Physical discomfort is easier to manage and eliminate if one has faith in oneself.

I wish I could reach into your heart and fill you with self-love and belief.

We walk beside you as you heal; but ultimately, we all walk the inner road by ourselves.

The best I can do is be here, continue to tell you how much I believe in you; and that, when you’re ready, I am honored to help.

Filed Under: Healthy Aging Tagged With: addiction, aging, failure, faith, fat, fear, food, food addiction, healing, health, healthy choices, healthy lifestyle, knowledge, love, natural, organic, rage, toxic, weight loss, wisdom

How to Spot if You Are Talking Yourself Out of a Good Thing

June 22, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

How do you spot if you’re talking yourself out of a good thing?

I’m not talking about an impulse buy. I’m talking about that noun — that person/place/thing/idea  — that you’ve been thinking about for weeks.  Months.  Years.

  1. Are you taking too long to think about it?

Whether it’s an idea, a pair of jeans, an opinion, or a bag of (fair trade, organic) nuts; are you deliberating longer than you should?

You know you want it. You even know you need it. You want to say it. It needs doing.

But you just sit there with it in your hand and your heart, looking at it. Deliberating over it.

  1. Are you worried that someone else won’t like it?

Is there a familiar sickly tug inside that is trying to remind you that you have to check with your wife/husband/daughter/boss/friend/cat before you make a move on that thing in your hand and heart?

  1. Are you feeling voices?

You read me right. Not hearing…feeling.

Is there a feeling of a voice inside, that sickly tug, that is saying:

  • It’s not going to work.
  • It’s a waste of time and money.
  • That’s not your place.
  • You don’t deserve such a fine thing.
  • You haven’t worked hard enough for that.
  • That would be selfish.
  • No one wants to hear that.
  1. Is your attention starting to drift?

The thing is in your hand and heart; and you start remembering that you haven’t done the whites yet. You have to pick up your daughter in 45 minutes. You have to call your brother back. You wonder if that check has cleared in the bank yet.  You need to check your Facebook or Instagram to see if anyone liked your last post.

  1. Is there a pain in your body?

Wherever there is a “weak link;” is it starting to flare up?  Is your “bad” knee starting to hurt? Your back? Are you getting a headache? Do you feel nauseous? Are you getting gassy?  Is your elbow aching?

  1. Are you still staring at it?

Is your hand starting to vacillate between holding it to your heart and putting it back on the shelf?

  1. Are you repeating all of the above over and over while you stare at your good thing?

 

Then yes. You are talking yourself out of a good thing.

Here’s what to do.

  1. Stop thinking.

You’ve done enough thinking about it. You know you want it, and you know how to get it.

  1. Commit to it.

Shut down the nagging advisors.  They are not in charge. You are. This is something you’ve wanted/needed to do for a long time.

  1. Run to the checkout./Open your mouth.

Let the people in the really real world, the ones OUTSIDE your head, know that you are committing to your plan/idea/opinion/thing.

  1. Own it.

Whatever it is, make it yours.  Open it. Craft it. Shape it. Eat it. Use it. Do it.

If it doesn’t fit, if it doesn’t work, if it wasn’t what you thought it would be:

Fix it. Make it better.

Or gently release it.

It doesn’t matter.

This is what matters:

You made a decision.  You owned it.  You acted on it.

That’s what really matters in the end.

Filed Under: Lifestyle, Spiritual Health Tagged With: failure, faith, fear, philosophy, success, wisdom

Something Will Beg You to Fear

June 19, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

Fear is Holding Us Back

If you haven’t seen the movie, Defending Your Life, you should. It is an incredibly intelligent Albert Brooks comedy from 1991, starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep.

I don’t know many people who remember the movie, and that’s unfortunate.  For me, this was a bellwether story. It voiced something that I had felt for a long time, but for which I had no words.

It’s about a man who dies (needlessly) in a car accident and finds himself in Judgement City, a sort of weigh station for souls.

At Judgement City, he must defend is life, in terms of how much fear he was able to overcome. If he was judged that he overcame his fear, he could “progress forward.”

If not, he had to be “sent back (reincarnated)” to try again in a next life.

Defending Your Life did not deliver a brand new message, but it was presented in a way that I could understand in a meaningful way.

Art is like that. Each piece of art is its own perspective on a premise. It may speak to millions or one.

The premise of Defending Your Life, as I understand it, is that fear is holding us back from our evolution.

I agree.

I’m am not saying we don’t need fear.  We can’t do without fear. Fear is part of what made us.

But fear has its place.  These days, for us in the Western world, it need not take a huge place.

Have you ever driven a stick shift?

You have to play the clutch and the gas against one another as you get the car from 0-15 mph (or 0-24 kph).

You need first gear for that.  It’s important, but only for a few moments.

Imagine that you have a car.

The car is a stick shift — a manual.  It has seven gears.

Now imagine that the car you are driving is life itself.

Fear is first gear in the Car of Life.

First Gear: Fear

Fear is as old as life itself.

Without fear, creatures do not know when to remove themselves from dangerous situations. Those who don’t fear, don’t survive. Fear is primal.

I’m eating a root. There’s a big animal with sharp teeth moving toward me in the grass.  I run.  Or I kill the animal before it kills me.

That’s the “fight-or-flight” response. It is an autonomic (automatic) nervous system response called the sympathetic response.

Fear gets you away from the sharp-toothed animal.

Then I rest and eat my root.

That’s the “rest and digest” response.  That is an autonomic nervous system response, too. It’s called the parasympathetic (“around-the-sympathetic”) response.

These are primal, necessary nervous system functions, the health of which cannot be ignored. We feel them every single day.

But you can’t run a car in first gear. You’ll burn out the engine.

You have to shift to second, third, fourth, etc…

Each gear builds on the gains of the others.

Second Gear: Love

Nature decided that life should have a nurturing aspect. The very next thing that Life gave us was the ability to love and care for others.

I just ran/killed that sharp-toothed animal and now I’m eating my root.

I see my neighbor. My neighbor wasn’t so lucky. His leg is bitten and bleeding, and he’s sick.

I don’t know what to do, but my root makes me feel better. 

I share my root.

Without love, life is little more than fight/flight, rest/digest, pee/poop, birth/death, with a little sex for relief. Hopefully.

Without love, nothing beyond the will to survive is possible.

Third Gear: Forethought

This is where the animals start to separate themselves out from other animals. The act of planning is a huge evolutionary step.

I have to gather and hunt to feed myself and my family.  What if I cooperate with my neighbors? We are all good at this and that. We can take on different tasks to get the job done better and faster, and we’ll have each other’s backs.

How do I get that across to them? We need some way we can share ideas in common so we know how to collaborate.

And…

It took my tribe and I four days to hunt this animal, and another four to carry it back to the family. How do we keep it fresh until then?

Soon it will be winter and it will be difficult to find food.  How do we store our food so we can make it until spring?

Without forethought, there is no science, no logic, no language, no architecture, no innovation, no adaption. No progress.

The Fourth Gear: Choice

Without choice, we have no real autonomy and no way to communicate alternative ideas peacefully.

My aunt wants me to gather berries.  But I like to hunt.  Also, we have many people who like to pick berries.  I think we need more hunters.  I will hunt.

I can either hurt my aunt’s feelings or I can persuade her that this is a good idea.  I would rather we are both happy, because I love my aunt. I will persuade her.  

If I can’t persuade her, I can either cut myself off from her or remind her that, although I will not take her advice, I love and respect her.  I don’t want to be apart from my aunt.  I choose to tell her I love and respect her.

Without choice, there is no real respect for one another beyond fear. There is no peace.

What is the fifth gear of life?

The Fifth Gear: Wonder

Wonder is the emotional result of the realization that there are forces at work that are greater than you and your tribe.

When the moon is full, the tide is very high. When the moon is gone, the tide is low. The moon makes the water rise.  The moon must be very powerful.  I wonder how the moon does that? I wonder if the moon knows I am here?

Wonder can be painful. Sometimes pain can cause fear. Pain is sometimes necessary for growth to occur.

My father was laughing with us last night. This morning his body was here, but it was cold and he never woke up.  My father is gone.  My father’s body is beginning to turn to earth. The Earth must want my father’s body.  But without my father, I don’t know who I am, or what my life means. Where did my father go? What will happen to me? What will happen to my family?

But because we have choice, we can choose how we process pain. Wonder lets us do this.

When we kill an animal, its body is inside me, and in the earth, like my father’s body. Is the animal a part of me? Did it have a soul, like my father?  Is it part of the earth, like my father?  Are we all?

Without wonder, there is no appreciation of mystery. There is no philosophy. There is no wisdom. There is no Homo sapien.

The Sixth Gear of Life: Art

Art is our intuitive expression of wonder. Art isn’t just the appreciation of something bigger than ourselves: it is our interpretation of that which is bigger than ourselves.

The moon is beautiful. I want to draw the moon and the water.

My father was funny.  I want my daughter to know this.  I will act out stories about my father to make her laugh.

I like the way I feel when I raise my voice high and low. It makes me feel warm and wonderful. I will sing.

You may have noticed that, as the car accelerates, the car slips into the higher gears more smoothly and easily. It seems as if they are seamless.

The car slips so easily past the sixth into the seventh gear, it’s difficult to know where it began.

Seventh Gear of Life: Oneness

Oneness is not just our interpretation of that which is bigger than ourselves; it is our awareness that we and that which is bigger than ourselves are one.

When I sit very still, I feel the moon glow and the cool waters flow inside me. They are part of me.

When I act the part of my father, I feel my father inside of me. My father is still with me.

If I am still and think of the animal inside me, I feel it becoming part of me. If I let myself, I feel the animal in the earth. I feel my father inside me and in the earth. I feel we are all part of one another.

Why am I telling you all this?

Because sometime today, something is going to beg you to fear.

  • You are going to hear about xxxx who was a victim of xxxx, and the results are brutal.
  • You are going to find out that someone took away someone else’s power/rights/life.
  • You are going to face a challenge.
  • You are going to be judged, fairly or unfairly, on your talents, your looks, your skills, your wit.
  • You are going to be subject to someone else’s fear. It might look and feel like violence (in this case, it probably is).
  • Someone will believe in you, will trust you, will have faith that you will do the right thing.

When any or all of this happens, I want you to remember:

Fear causes pain. Pain can be necessary for growth. Pain can send you backward, or you can process it differently and move forward.

You have a choice. Wonder.

 

Filed Under: Spiritual Health Tagged With: failure, faith, fear, healing, health, knowledge, love, philosophy, science, success, toxic, wisdom

Is Failure Your Path to Freedom?

June 12, 2017 by Claire Fitzpatrick

Is failure your path to freedom?

“I can’t…”

Can’t is a four-letter word.

“I shouldn’t.”

Who says?

“But what about…”

Eliminate the word “but” from your vocabulary. Replace it with “and.” “What about” has its place during the active planning and execution of an idea – not the avoidance of your dream.

“What will they think of me?”

Do you really care, unless it is showing your children how to be an excellent person? Most people care about what you do when they feel as if they are failing at what they do. Misery loves company.

Are you showing your children how to be an excellent person by what you doing now?

showing your children

“I hate rejection.”

I do too.  I really do.  There is just no way to avoid rejection.  Rejection is a necessary step toward your success.  We all fall as our nervous systems learn how to make us walk. I hate falling, too.

“Someone told me that this is stupid, that I was being selfish and reckless. They said I would fail. they were telling me for my own good, that they wouldn’t tell me if they didn’t care.”

They were telling you that because you once relied on them for wisdom.

their wisdom never workedtheir wisdom never worked

Their wisdom never worked. Ever.

They sense that you are right, that you are leaving them behind.

Misery loves company.

Even if you love them, you cannot help them by staying with them in their misery.  You can only help them by passing them.

By the way, in this they are right:

You will fail.

Failure is the same as rejection. The only path to success is through failure after failure. Each failure is another bridge crossed toward success.

That is the secret.  That is why so few achieve success.

No one wants to fail.

Neither do I.  Failing hurts.

Failing only wins if you don’t get back up.

I tell you now: The only way to fail is to never try, or to give up too soon.

dare to fail

I am, as of this writing, fifty.  I have been failing all my life.  I was once ashamed of that, until I realized that because I relentlessly let myself fail, I am free.

I am disciplined in achieving failure. Because, with every failure, I overcome my fear.

Fear kills the body, kills the mind, deadens the spirit.

Fear is what keeps you silent when you see that things are going terribly wrong.

Dare to fail.

is failure your path to freedom

Trust that the universe has you, that falling through the door of failure leads to the path of success.

One of my great mentors, Joseph Campbell, once wrote:

 

We have not even to risk the adventure alone

for the heroes of all time have gone before us.

The labyrinth is thoroughly known …

we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.

And where we had thought to find an abomination

we shall find a God.

And where we had thought to slay another

we shall slay ourselves.

Where we had thought to travel outwards

we shall come to the center of our own existence.

And where we had thought to be alone

we shall be with all the world.”

menu of lifemenu of life

Push away that plate of, “IT’S THE SAME THING EVERY DAY.”

Be bold. Go forth and fail with determination.  Know that just beyond the bend of failure is everything you ever wanted for yourself and your family.

I gift and grant you loving permission to fail.

Filed Under: Spiritual Health Tagged With: failure, fear, healing, health, knowledge, longevity, love, philosophy, success, toxic, wisdom

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