Giving Respect

Has anyone ever said to you, “You have to earn my respect”? I know when I have heard it it didn’t feel very good. Why not? There is an underlying message. It means that I start out from a place of no respect. It means that I don’t respect you until you prove yourself worthy of my respect. It means I am not worthy. And that doesn’t feel very good.

It further means that there are levels of respect. You may be worth more or less respect. It means you may be worth more or less. Your personhood is being evaluated and deemed worthy. Your personhood is being deemed worthy of consideration. And if you do not earn your respect, you may be unworthy of consideration.

This is conditional respect. It is no different than conditional love. It means you are not seen in your perfection at all times and fully accepted for who you are. It means you are only accepted for what you do, not who you are.

The confusion arises with our need to evaluate a person’s skills. Here, respect means our regard for a quality or skill a person possesses. I do want to evaluate a plumber before he takes apart my sink. I need to know his skill level. If he is a true craftsman, than I will admire him. But this is about what he does, not who he is. He is always worthy of my consideration for his personhood, independent of his skills. My love is separate from my admiration. I may not admire everyone, but I can love everyone.

We have become so obsessed with doing as a culture, that we may forget to see the person doing it. Just as they do to themselves, we think that they are the things that they do. They are as loveable and respectable as the things they do. Admiration is about the doing. Respect can also be about the doing. But it also has the sense of love.

What if I said, “You have all of my respect from the start. You are going to have to work really hard to lose it”? How would that change your life? And the world?

How could you lose my respect? If you push hard enough, you will find some place inside me where I don’t respect myself. If you manage to burrow down to the bottom of that hole with me, then in that dark place you will lose my respect. Because there is none there. For me or for you. There is no love there, either. And if you have pushed me that far, I will assume it is because you are not respecting⎯or loving⎯yourself. So there we will be, two people with no love or respect for ourselves sitting in the dark at the bottom of a hole. Pretty bleak. No way out.

How do we get out of there? It takes someone to come along who respects themselves deeply⎯meaning more than us⎯to bring some light to that place so we can begin to see ourselves again. With that glimmer of light, we can start to see again, and find our way out of the hole.

So bring on your respect. Show up with your respect full-on. There are a lot of people around us who do not respect themselves as much you do. Let them see themselves reflected in your respect for them. And may that moment be a turning point for them, when they caught a peek at themselves beyond their doubt. Let it be a moment when the lie dies, the lie that they are not worthy, for a lie cannot sustain itself once it has cracked. And let that be the start to all of us finding our way back to our full love and respect for ourselves.

Back Pain: Testing My Joy

It was a few days before my back surgery. I could stand for maybe 30 seconds before the pain hit. Maybe a minute. It would start in my hip and spread down through my thigh, down my calf, and into my foot. But it was breakfast time, and I was home alone, and I was hungry.

I made it to the kitchen. I really wanted some eggs. Scrambled would be fast, I thought. Standing at the stove, I can feel time running out, and the eggs are not cooking fast enough. “Come on!”, I actually said aloud. The pain is here. I get the eggs on a plate. The table isn’t far. I turn, walk a few feet, and it is too much. I can’t make it. I go down. The eggs don’t matter. The pain is all there is.

I am lying on the kitchen floor and I am screaming. It helps the pain to scream. I am screaming at the top of my lungs. My hip and my leg are consumed with ripping fire. If I can scream loud enough, I can match the pain, and I can almost bear it. Not that I have a choice.

And then in the middle of this agony, I realize, “Huh, you’re not actually unhappy”. Sure, I am in an insane amount of pain, but I am not unhappy. Rather, I have this odd sense of joy. Or rather, I still have my joy. Yes, I want this to be over, want to be out of the pain, but it is just pain. It is probably the most intense pain I have ever felt. I am thinking “God, this fucking hurts! But I am so alive! What a ride! Wow! Jesus, this is intense, I didn’t know I could feel this! FUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!”.

But I am not making up the stories I used to in these moments. I am not making up the story that I won’t have a job, or that I won’t have a family, or that I won’t be loved. I do not tell myself, “See. This proves it. Here you are, not good enough.” I do not go “woe is me.”

It is just a sensation. Well, not just a sensation. A big god dammed horrible sensation. But here’s the thing: The pain is independent of who I am. I am here to experience it and there is not meaning to it beyond just the pain. There is no meaning to it about who I am. The pain I used to create⎯the real suffering⎯was the pain of how I diminished myself. The deeper truth is that I was already feeling unworthy⎯the pain was already there: the stories of woe I made up arose out of my deepest core pain of believing I was nothing.

So in that moment on the kitchen floor, I felt like I had passed a test: Had I really transformed? Did I really believe and know my own perfection and the love that I am? Yes, my deep joy in life comes from feeling the love that I am, and nothing, not even this excruciating pain, can change that. Love and joy are independent of the landscape of my life, independent of the feelings I have in the moment. I can still have my joy when I am sad, afraid, or angry. Or happy.

Be, Do, Get: Getting Your Life to Flow

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile, with a beautiful wife, and a beautiful house, and you may ask yourself, “How did I get here?”.

-The Talking Heads

We tend to live by this rule: Get, Do, Be. First we decide what we want to get. Then we figure out what to do to get it. Then after the doing and getting we should end up in some state of being. The state of being is truly our goal, such as happy, peaceful, or connected. Our big mistake is not realizing this, thinking the getting is our goal. The difficulty is that what state arises out of our getting and doing is rather unpredictable: if we Get, Do, Be, what we get may not be in alignment with who we are. It is hard to buy a present for someone you've never met. And this time, the recipient may be yourself.

If, on the other hand, you start from a place of being, then you have a better chance that where you end up is in alignment with your deepest sense of being. Let the doing arise out of the being, and then let the getting unfold from the doing, then whatever you get will be aligned with your need for a state of being. When you are moving⎯doing⎯opportunities open up along your path for getting. And here, getting is better called receiving. Because it is on your path that you created from the place of being, when you Be, Do, Get, what you get will be perfectly what you need, in alignment with your deepest desires.

So here is a prescription for aligning your life: start from a state of being (this is the hardest part, because you must let go of anything you hope to get). Make sure that this is not a state of doing, like “walking in the woods”: there, peacefulness may be the state of being. Then begin to envision a doing arising out of this state of being. You must then choose from all the possible things you can do. Choose the one that makes your heart the warmest. Then once you are doing, let the getting unfold. What you receive will be equal to, and in alignment with, the energy you pour into it from your state of being. See it all lining up: the Being, the Doing, the Receiving. See yourself as the headwaters for your life. Let your life pour down the mountain out of the joy in your being. This is flow.

Finally, at Peace

It has been a long road to this moment, captured by my photographer friend Marcy Mendelson. Finally, I can stop running: I am enough. Finally, I know that I matter. And when I completely matter, nothing matters---when I know the love that I am, nothing is at risk anymore. I have what I need. What a wonderful sense of freedom! There is nothing to do. Just sit and breathe and enjoy the sun and the air and the ocean and my warm skin and the hard rocks under me so solid and my heart beating and beating and beating and I am alive. It is intoxicating. And then a desire to do arises: to help. To help other people to understand. To help other people to understand the love that they are, that we all are.

The root of attachments: Attachments are not the cause but the result of our pain.

The root of all of our pain is not our attachments. Our attachments are a symptom of the root of our pain. The root of our pain is not knowing that we are love. When we don’t love ourselves, we attach ourselves to entities to create an illusion of being love. When we do not know that we are love, we ask everything around us to tell us that we are love. And then we have attached our hearts and our souls to something that has nothing to do with us, is on its own ride. This is a dangerous thing to do, because when it goes up, you go up, and when it goes down, you go down, and when it dies, you die too. So it may appear that the attachments are the cause of your pain, because it is such a poor way to manage your deeper pain of not feeling loveable. So don’t cut your attachments, for that is harsh, almost cruel to yourself. It is akin to yelling at a child who is crying to stop crying. The way out is to feel your attachments, fully embody your attachments, and see through to their roots. And begin to see the child who is crying down there on the other end of your attachments, and begin to love that child.