Radical Awe Is The Reset Button

In my last post, I wrote about the times when I have experienced the feeling that everything I knew about life was wrong.  All too often, our lives challenge us to see life beyond our limited current story about our selves, our relationships, our work and the nature of reality.  This can be an extraordinarily frightening and confusing experience.  We can spend an inordinate amount of time feeling stuck, running around the hamster wheel that consists of our story about the world. 

We are hot-wired to shrink our attention to the thing that causes us irritation and pain.  I could be walking down a beautiful beach in Hawaii on a warm, comfortable sunny day.  A gorgeous woman in a bikini could be giving me a “come hither” look, and I’ll miss the entire scene and opportunity if my attention is stuck worrying about a single piece of gravel in my shoe.  Likewise, we are biologically hot-wired to pay attention to the perception of “lack” in our lives.  This can have great survival value if we are worried about famine or shelter.  However, we perceive lack as relative to our situation.  So, someone who lives in a  $90,000 home might find himself celebrating when he moves into a $250,000 home.  However, the same fellow might feel impoverished if he spends his time socializing with friends who live in $3million dollar homes. 

Our pain, fear, worry, and depression tend to lock our awareness into rigid narratives about the world and ourselves.  One of the toughest skills to acquire is the ability to expand our current awareness away from our current states of pain and lack to see the world in a larger, more complex fashion. 

I know of no better or effective way to break out of these restrictive tales we tell ourselves than experiencing radical awe.  States of extreme awe or wonder shake apart our limited notions and reshape our sense of the world and ourselves.

My clients often ask me, “So where do I find these states of radical awe?”  Obviously, we can’t just go out and decide that we are going to schedule an experience of wonder.  However, we can pursue activities that have a better chance of producing these experiences than others.  Hiking and camping in nature, star-gazing, attending a birth, reading a religious or scientific work that has the potential to revolutionize your thinking.  Meditation, contemplation and prayer, certain works of art, music, literature and even having great sex can produce states of radical awe. 

Feeling stuck?  Press the reset button.  Seek out radical awe and wonderment.