What if I told you you didn’t need a counselor? What all your problems could go away simply by sitting and thinking?
All of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for thirty minutes alone - Pascal
I was always the type of person to listen to the problems of my friends, look at their situation with logic and reason, and tell them what I thought. It’s remarkable what you can figure out when you look at a thing for what it truly is with logic and reason.
My hunch is people don’t believe they can change themselves. we put our faith in figures wether they be therapists helping us get over our experiences, tv hosts telling us how to make money, or politicians how we can make our country better. Have you ever thought some might not know what the hell they’re doing?
I was half watching Spiderman: Far From Home and Spiderman’s friend said, “You’ve gotta save us, we’re counting on you!” He’s like, look. I’m gonna go hang out with my girlfriend, you go save the day. Granted, the context might have been Godzilla attacking the city, but it’s easy to remove yourself from the problem or say I can’t do anything about it. The same mentality is what allows me to be having drinks at a conference in LA when people’s houses are being burned down 15 miles away about a month ago. But unpacking that could be a whole series of posts.
My hunch is a big reason why we give our problems up to therapists without being able to work through them ourselves is our emotions clouding our judgement.
If the car, airplane, and skyscrapers were the result of human thought, can we not govern our emotional relationship with our emotions?
When some people work on their body they diet but don’t exercise. Or vice versa. You don’t have to be the whole therapist. You can try being the assistant first.
The problem
When we when we grow up, there’s all this stuff happening to you in your life and some of it you're processing, some of it you're absorbing, and some of it you should probably think a little bit more about and work through, but you don't you don't have time. So it gets buried in you and it's all these preferences and judgements and unresolved situations and issues.
It's like your email inbox piling up email after email that's not answered, going back 10, 20, 30, 40 years and then when you sit down to meditate, those emails start coming back.
That gets scary. People don't want to do. What's happening is this. it's it's self therapy. it's just that. instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you are listening to yourself and you just have to sit there as those emails go through one by one. you work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero. that’s when meditation starts
The challenge
the problem with what I'm talking about, which is not focusing on your breath, is you will have to listen to your mind for a long time.
it's not gonna work unless you do at least an hour a day and preferably at least 60 days before you kind of work through a lot of issues.
so it'll be hard for a while but when you come out the other side it's great. you get rid of the chatter, or when the chatter comes it's in the background.
Quotes are from Naval’s JRE Interview
I’ve been using the Oak app to meditate, slowly ratcheting up my time spent meditating daily. The app tracks your streaks which is a huge motivator. My longest streak is 38 days. Massive chains are great, peace of mind is better.
I’m doing a modified version of this challenge. Starting yesterday, I’m meditating with ohms or silence for 30 minutes a day. Just sitting there. Being with myself, with the goal to go for an hour in January.
Join me. Inner Monolog is much more than words on a page.
Song of the Day