Whatever physical injury or mental anguish has come your way, the most important truth to remember about your suffering is:

It took a long time for your body to get this way.

Which means it will take a long time to get some other way. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And if you have any intention of getting back to your old self again, then try to be patient and loving with your recovery.

Because it takes perseverance and time to heal, often much more than you’d like. Progress is incredibly slow and exasperatingly incremental, but it is possible. Our minds and bodies are capable of extraordinary restorative powers, it just takes a while.

Think of it this way.

Have you ever see a dog lick its wounds before? There’s a science behind this ritual.

A dog’s saliva has been clinically found to heal wounds. It contains chemicals that are antibacterial, and the motion of a dog’s tongue can aid the cleansing and healing process, as the saliva loosens debris on the surface of a cut.

Forgive the anthropomorphism here, but that’s a beautiful expressing of love, acceptance and patience. Dogs don’t beat themselves up about the mistake they made which caused the cut, they don’t rehearse their catastrophic future about what this cut means for their lives, and they’re not frozen in fear contemplating the worst case scenarios of the cut escalating into something worse.

They’re just licking themselves. Being active participants in their suffering, rather than victims.

Humans could learn a thing or two from our canine friends. Imagine how much calmer we would be if we were willing to submit ourselves to the ancient rhythms of our internal sea. Imagine how much lighter we would feel if we were willing to surrender to the wind and wherever it blows.

Blood pressure levels would drop worldwide.

Let us return to the mantra from before:

It took a long time for your body to get this way.

Be patient as you return to your old self. Hurry has no blessing. Impatience, rushing and insisting on instant results only slow down our recovery.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Will you remain tolerant and courageous as you face all the dismantling required for you to heal?

Heartland’s popular forgiveness scale says that over course of our lives, negative things may occur because of three factors.

Our own actions, the actions of others, or circumstances beyond our control.

And if you take the quiz, you’ll notice that the questions address the degree to which you have negative thoughts or feelings after the events happen.

That’s a critical distinction. Because with the exception of sociopaths, everyone feels badly at first when they mess up.

But the real question is, can we give ourselves some slack during the aftermath? Can we accept that things go wrong for reasons that can’t be controlled, or will we get stuck in negative thoughts about ourselves, others and the world?

This is a very hard skill to learn that takes years of practice to get good at it. In fact, we’re never really done with forgiveness. As long as we’re breathing, life will continue to disappoint us. And some of us will beat the shit out of ourselves for it, while others make peace with bad situations and move past them.

Makes me think of my dream from last night:

A group of us were lost in a parking lot, trying to find my car. It was right here a minute ago, I told my friends, but now it was gone. Nowhere in sight. Part of me felt foolish for misplacing something so huge, and part of me felt guilty for wasting everyone’s time looking for it, including my own. By the time I woke up, those feelings of foolishness and guilt still coursed through my veins.

And I had to remind myself, it’s okay, it was just a dream, you’re not a bad person for misplacing your car.

This is the kind of accepting conversation we have to have with ourselves in order to forgive. Because holding grudges against ourselves for negative things we’ve done is only going to make us more anxious. Criticizing ourselves for negative things we’ve felt, thought or said is only going to compound whatever pain we already have.

That’s the benefit of forgiveness nobody is talking about. The process of letting go, of self, of other, of the world, loosens anxiety’s grip on our mind.

Multiple studies have shown that forgiveness is correlated positively with cognitive flexibility, positive affect and psychological wellbeing. And so, as hard as it is for us to accept negative situations that aren’t anybody’s fault, it might be our best path towards genuine inner calm.

Let us all learn to accept that we are humans who have complicated feelings and reactions that we are responsible for but cannot always control.

Let us learn to see ourselves as good people, even though we have hurt ourselves in the past.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Have you ever reflected on how a lack of forgiveness might be keeping you stuck?

My favorite type of review for any service professional is when the customer writes:

She made me feel like we had been friends for ages.

Have you ever had that feeling before? Where the first time you met someone, you felt like you’d known him all your life?

This special brand of interaction is fascinating to me. When strangers are able to cut the formalities and start connecting for real, and the conversation flows like taffy being pulled, it makes a strong argument for the existence of magic.

And while it’s not the kind of experience that can be reverse engineered, there are some patterns worth noting.

If you scan a few dozen reviews, for example, customers tend to use the same kinds of words when describing their service provider.

Calm, smile, laugh, happy, warm genuine, instantly, comfortable.

These traits are not specific to one personality or profession. Some may be harder for people at work to generate than others, but overall, these are all standard customer service best practices.

My favorite review was a customer of a car dealership who noted about her salesman:

Refreshing that you didn’t have to sweat when your back was turned to him.

That reveals more about the automotive industry than the employee, but that’s another story.

The lesson here is something that’s been a business philosophy of mine for many years.

People buy people first. Companionship is one of the few feelings in the world that drives a people’s focus into the present moment, narrows their awareness down to the activity of interacting itself, and makes them feel like time has disappeared.

No wonder customers said they felt like they’d know the service prover all their lives.

Pwc recently surveyed a sample of fifteen thousand people from twelve countries on the modern customer experience. Their research discovered that after the trait of convenience, friendly service was what people valued most in their customer experience.

Nearly half of them would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience. And sixty percent of all consumers said they’d stop doing business with a brand if the service they received was not friendly.

Now are you convinced that every employee at every business should wear a nametag?

If you want more loyal customers, make friends with the world and its peoples.

Remember what it felt like the last time you worked with someone who made you feel like you had been friend for ages, and see if you can’t pay that companionship forward.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What makes buying from you a relaxing experience?

Faith is a complicated, misused, misunderstood word.

And that’s fine with me.

Because there are as many paths to faith as there are people to walk them. It’s not about what’s right or wrong or good or bad, it’s simply a choice each person makes about their inner lives to help survive the insanity of the outer one.

Even if that means not having any faith, which is still a choice, and perfectly acceptable one.

Here are several philosophies on the topic that resonate with me.

Recovery programs teach us that faith is believing that there is a greater power beyond our own ego, and it can be whatever we rely on for our source of strength. Imagine how not being the center of the universe might make you of greater service to the people in your life?

Franciscan monks say that faith is the freedom not to know, not to have answers for everything, to be able to combine a degree of knowing with a degree of not needing to know, because we’re being held at a level deeper than cerebral knowing. Imagine how not pretending to have certainty about the world might make your anxiety lessen and your conflicts reduce?

Tillich wrote that faith is the most centered act of the human mind and the ultimate concern as an act of the total personality, and it happens in the center of the life with all of its elements. Imagine how much easier your decisions would be if you trusted that everything belonged?

Personally, I like to treat faith as one of those rare chances to relax and not force answers, and ask some questions instead.

Allow me to list a few of them.

What if you could just be where you are?
What if you could just accept that right now is exactly where you are supposed to be?
What if you could just believe that you were headed in the right direction for your life?
What if you could just surrender to being held by the larger stream of life and actually enjoy this moment? 

These questions soothe me during difficult and prosperous times alike. They don’t sign me up for some magic lottery that makes everything okay, but they do stimulate sparks of hope, calm and gratitude an otherwise complicated and chaotic world.

And that faith gives me a meaningful experience of deep consciousness and communion with the mystery. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
How are you placing your faith in the perfection of the universe?

There’s no such thing as finding your dream job.

But there is a such thing as creating a fulfilling life, of which our job is a key part. That job doesn’t have to be the biggest or most important container of meaning in our life, but it still can contribute to our overall level of satisfaction with it.

If there’s one thing you learn in recovery for workaholism, it’s that work is merely one spoke on a larger wheel of existence. It’s just one of many folders in our diverse portfolio of happiness.

When we assume that baseline posture of abundance and enoughness, we become more aware of our entire existential horizon, we’re be less likely to feel that our dream has degraded into a nightmare.

Koontz’s beautiful poem springs to mind:

On the road that I have taken,
one day, walking, I awaken,
amazed to see where I have come,
where I’m going, where I’m from.

This is not the path I thought, this is not the place I sought,
this is not the dream I bought, just a fever of fate I’ve caught.
I will change highways in a while, at the crossroads, one more mile.
My path is lit by my own fire, going only where I desire.

Not a dream job, but a fulfilled life. This distinction is critical. We have to intentionally frame our work in a manner that makes us feel true to our value system, even if we don’t love every minute of it.

Reflecting on my own career, several of my jobs were boring and underpaid, but because my whole identity wasn’t wrapped up in them, the whole my life still managed to feel fulfilling.

Maisel’s research on the act of making means suggests asking ourselves a question about our dreams before pursuing them:

Is this container capable of holding my beliefs and dreams?

If so, even at a lower level than we might prefer, then that that container is worth adding as a new spoke on our wheel of fulfillment. That mindset assures that the work we do assumes greater significance in our own minds, as it’s poured into our meaning container, capturing and gathering weight, rather than allowing it to drain away.

And you might be thinking to yourself, now wait a minute, you’re not really happier at work, you’re just tremendously good at deluding yourself.

But why should those two ideas be mutually exclusive? In this vortex of unrelenting despair called life, deluding ourselves is the one of the most important survivals tool we have.

If fulfillment is the goal, then we owe it ourselves to do whatever it takes to make it a reality. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
Are you focused on finding your dream job, or creating your fulfilling life?