Rose & the Hamster Wheel (Part 2)
Photo by Frenjamin Benklin
Reading time: 3-4 minutes
Okay! Last we last left off, Rose had worked with a coach, Gotten Very Honest about the limiting beliefs batting around in her brain, switched up her job, met her soul mate, Rushil, and did a 180 life turnaround. Way to crush it, Rose! (If you didn’t read Part 1, check it out here. “Rose” is a fictional composite of past coaching clients + you, me, and everyone else we know.)
As the years wore on, did our Rose continue to bloom? Or did her transformations wilt over time? Let’s find out…
Rose’s Ongoing Courses at the Planet Earth Academy: the Next 15 Yrs (Age 40-55)
Rose and Rushil moved in together and went on to enjoy a rewarding long-term partnership, although R&R weren’t strangers to the ups and downs that came with any committed relationship (and life). Before they met, the dynamic duo had done enough inner work to know that when Jerry McGuire said “you complete me,” he didn’t yet understand that nothing good ever comes from expecting someone else to make you happy! Feeling complete, R&R had learned, was about taking responsibility for their own happiness and staying committed to growing together through life’s setbacks and challenges.
And, lord, Rose & Rushil had plenty of those! Here’s a peak at a few:
Rose wasn’t able to get pregnant after years of trying, which devastated them both. Rushil got laid off from his job and couldn’t find new work for months, during which time he developed an addiction to a video game called Tomb Raiders and bulk ordering gummy bears from Amazon. (He later moved on to a different type of gummy, if you know what I mean). Rose had to force him off the couch and into therapy. Once Rushil had successfully returned to the world, they decided to give up on having kids of their own and take in foster children. R&R grew deeply passionate about this work; it brought them unexpected joy. But it also put them through their paces, especially when 15 year-old Roy burned down their garage after watching how-to videos about fire throwing on YouTube. In addition to their family life, Rose kept taking on new challenges in her career, which satisfied her, until she eventually decided to leave her 9 to 5 to follow a new dream: starting a business to help guide others through the fostering process. Needless to say, this new move heightened R&R’s stress levels and pinched their finances while she got things off the ground. And so on and so forth at the Life Academy. A lot can happen in fifteen years!
Did Rose’s newly transformed self handle all of this change with Zen-like perfection and grace?
Of course not. Rose was human. She had periods of grief, ups and downs, some sleepless nights and times of heightened anxiety. She witnessed some of her old never-enough mind stories re-emerge from their hideaways and continued working with her coach to do the mindset work she needed to do to push through.
After so many years of practice observing the movements of her mind, Rose could see that these mental narratives tended to surface in direct response to life’s unknowns. Whenever something unexpected happened, she took a risk in a new direction, or stepped outside her comfort zone, old fears and narratives were re-activated—that primal part of her brain doing its thing to protect her—and her nervous system always followed suit (or vice versa). The more she was able to watch this body-mind activity and simply be aware of it versus follow it down the chutes and ladders of suffering, the more she was able to continue to stay open to all of the possibilities and take the small steps she needed to take to create a fulfilling life.
This practice of choosing which wolf to feed (trust vs. fear) brought Rose a lot of peace and contentment, despite life’s inevitable challenges.
Still, it mystified Rose that no matter how aware she seemed to get, and how trusting of life (and herself) she became, she couldn’t seem to keep the unwanted mind activity and emotion from rising.
Then, one day, a lightbulb moment…
Rose saw her old never-enough story pop up yet again when one of her largest nonprofit donors backed out (maybe I’m not “good enough” to run my own business after all)—and, boom, she got it.
Rose saw that one of the Giant Ego Stories underwriting all of the other never-enough stories was that life was somehow singling her out. While life seemed to reward “everyone else” with easy success, happiness, and contentment—why, just look at their lives on LinkedIn, Insta, and Facebook, etc.—it kept kicking Rose where it hurt. (Why me? What’s wrong with me?) In her moment of realization, Rose could see that she had unconsciously bought into a profoundly fictional storyline that said she was somehow unique when, in reality: this was life at the Planet Earth Academy for EVERYONE. This was how the mind worked for everyone. Struggle, challenge, and disappointment were inevitable for everyone. It might vary in degree and context, but unwanted situations, thoughts, and emotions were inevitable— for everyone.
(In Western culture we are particularly obsessed with covering up our humanity and pain with false positivity or what Martha Beck calls “happywashing,” so no wonder Rose felt alone. Very few people are publicly honest. However, ironically, the result of this Great Coverup, not normalizing honest thoughts and e-motion, is that it keeps old patterns and habits stuck, which is what keeps our lives, and our world, stuck.)
“The more you love roses the more you must bear with thorns.” - Matshona Dhliwayo
Finally, Rose could admit that challenge, contrast, and adversity were built into the fabric of existence for all life forms, not just humans. Pain was inevitable, yes, but the suffering around it, Rose realized… was optional.
This, Rose saw, was the key to enjoying her life more: to simply embrace it all.
Which brought her up against one of the greatest paradoxes of this existence: accepting life, exactly as it is right now, accepting herself, exactly as she is right now… while remaining committed to growing, evolving, creating and expanding. The only way to reconcile these seemingly contradictory paths—accepting What Is while evolving; being while becoming; allowing the movement of emotion, while anchoring herself into what doesn’t move; living in the Now, while setting goals and envisioning future possibilities—was to stop trying to reconcile them.
To let it all be so because it all is just so.
To stop trying to fix something that isn’t broken.
To give 100 and then let it go.
To, simply, allow herself to enjoy life and be free...
“You and I are in training to be free. We’re in training to be so present, so spacious, so embracing, we’re in training to not look away, deny or close our hearts when we can’t bear something…When you close your heart down to protect yourself from [pain], you also close yourself off from being fed by that same life situation. If you can stay open to both the [pain] and the joys and the stuff of life, all of it, then it’s like a living spirit. It just connects to your living spirit and there’s a tremendous feeding going on.” - Ram Dass
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