Rose & the Hamster Wheel (Part 2)

Photo by Frenjamin Benklin

Reading time: 3-4 minutes

Okay! Last we last left off, Rose had gone through therapy, worked with a coach, Gotten Very Honest about the limiting beliefs playing peaknuckle 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 was doped up on goopy new love feels and asking for trouble. Nothing good ever comes from expecting someone else to make you happy. Being loved, they knew, was ultimately about taking responsibility for their own happiness.

That said, they’d also learned that expecting a partner to love you “just as you are,” forever and ever amen, was just more delusion. R&R knew the reason their relationship worked in a way past relationships didn’t was because: a) they laughed (and hugged)—a lot; b) they were committed to being honest with themselves and each other about old ego patterns and conditioning, which is what enabled them to: c) accept each other’s struggles, frailties, annoying habits, and wounded parts, while helping each other to embody the best versions of themselves.

(And they laughed—-and hugged. A lot. Deep intimacy isn’t always about sex. Never discount the healthy doses of Oxytocin and Serotonin downloads we get from a simple 20-second hug.)

In other words: they didn’t have it all figured out, but their commitment to each other, and to themselves, deepened because they were focused on not just surviving life’s setbacks, disappointments, and challenges, but growing through them.

And, lord, there were plenty of setbacks. 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 pounds of gummy bears from Amazon (later moving on to a different type of gummies if you know what I mean). Rose had to force him off the couch and into therapy by threatening to walk. It worked. 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 lighting his farts on fire after watching how-to videos 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 the organization to follow a new dream: starting a nonprofit to guide others through the fostering process. Needless to say, this 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 with Zen-like perfection and grace?

Not a chance. Rose had periods of grief, ups and downs, some sleepless nights and times of heightened anxiety. She witnessed many of her old never-enough mind stories re-emerge from their hideaways: feeling like a failure for not being able to have kids; feeling like a failure when she wanted to kick Rushil out of the house versus love him through his gummies phase; feeling like a failure when she lost patience with the kids; feeling like a failure when she found herself falling back into old poor-me beliefs about how life was stacked against her, some disastrous event always hovering around the corner, making her feel like no matter what she did, life would always find a way to swoop in and steal away her contentment just when she’d re-found it again.

After so many years of observing the movements of her mind, Rose knew these stories tended to surface in relation 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 got re-activated. It was that primitive part of her brain doing its thing to protect her—and her nervous system following 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 the possibilities and to keep taking the bold steps she needed to take to create the life she wanted.

This practice of choosing which wolf to feed (trust vs. fear) brought Rose a lot of peace and contentment, despite the inevitable ups and downs.

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 mind activity, and unwanted emotion, from rising.

Then, one day, a lightbulb moment…

Rose saw the 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 be rewarding “everyone else” with easy success, happiness, and contentment— 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? Why do I suck so badly at being human?) In her moment of realization, Rose could see that she had unconsciously been buying 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. They might vary in degree and context, but unwanted situations were inevitable for everyone. Unwanted emotions were inevitable for everyone. Unwanted thoughts were inevitable for everyone. Pain was inevitable for everyone. Being human was inevitable for everyone!

Rose was special, yes, and also not so special.

(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, after enough classes at the Academy, Rose could see that her thorns weren’t going to magically disappear the more work she did on herself, like some of the New Age people seemed to preach. 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.

It became clear to Rose that the majority of her suffering came from the same place: buying into the poor-me stories about the struggle, the narratives about how life should look and feel. Despite her relative contentment, Rose realized that some part of her was still expecting the external world to look and act a certain way in order for her to feel a certain way, as opposed to letting the dance of life, the dance of herself, be what it was—with all of its pain, boulders, thorns, struggle, boredom, AND all of its magic, joy, love, wonder, adventure, and awe.

This, our fair flower knew, was the key to enjoying her life even more: to simply embrace it all.

Which brings our Rose up against one of the greatest paradoxes of life: accepting life, exactly as it is right now, accepting herself, exactly as she is right now, while 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 one’s identity in 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 just is anyway.

To give 100 and then let it go, trust the unfolding.

What would life be like if Rose did that all. the. way. through?

If she stopped wrestling, resisting, and pushing against life?

Trying to fix what wasn’t broken?

What would it be like if she just… truly let go?

“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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