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.

What Is Your Relationship To The Universe?

I know this sounds like an odd question. But, it’s one that I often ask at the beginning of therapy with a new client. Before I get into why I ask this question, let me share with you my own bias and experience. Simply stated, the world is always bigger, more complicated, and surprising than my story about it. When I was 19, I woke up one day only to realize everything I knew about life was wrong. It was a frightening experience. But, I was resilient and survived. When I was 27 years old, again, I realized that everything I knew about life was wrong. Since I experienced something like this before, I knew that I had survived.  While the experience was difficult,  the process of regaining my emotional equilibrium was less frightening. Again, the same thing happened when I was 38. But having experienced this twice before, I began to become intrigued. Now, I’m in my sixties, and I’ve come to realize that if every seven years or so I don’t come to a point in my thinking where everything I know is wrong, I’m probably not paying attention.

Psychological theorists and researchers believe, as I do, that there are a number of dimensions of human development that are possible. Both psychoanalysts and behaviorists talk about human development along the lines of emotional, cognitive, personality, sexual, social and even emotional maturation. But, there are also theorists like William James, Jung, Assagioli, Meisner, and Kohlberg who examined the spiritual and moral development of humans. And so, I routinely ask my clients “What is your relationship to the universe? Are you an atheist? Agnostic? Spiritual person? Do you believe in a particular religion? When I ask this question, I find it’s essential to clarify what the client actually believes, not what their family or clergy required them to believe. By understanding my client’s answer to these questions, more often than not, we can quickly get to a better understanding of the client’s core beliefs about their world, their values, their emotional, moral, ethical and spiritual strengths. This often comes as a relief to my clients because they don’t feel like they have to hide the core of their beliefs from me.

Many of my clients are curious about my own spiritual beliefs, often wondering if I am there to influence them into any particular direction. For the last 45 years, Judaism has been my personal path. However, since the world presents us with a story that is always bigger, crazier and more unexpected than I can ever conceive; as a psychotherapist, it’s my job to challenge my clients to become more authentically who they are and to challenge their stories about the world that are too small to fit the realities they live in. So, if someone walks into my office and they are not a better atheist, agnostic, eclectically spiritual person, Christian, Buddhist, (you name it) when they leave, I haven’t done my job as a therapist.

The Problem with the Past

One of the most misunderstood legacies of Freud was the notion that our personalities were “set” by the age of five and that after that our personalities simply did not change. Even Freud admitted to the ability of the human personality to change. That’s why psychoanalysis was invented. However, most of us in the 21rst century have bought into this odd notion that we are the same person that we have always been. Our personalities are set and the forces that were set into motion by our past decisions will determine our future fate. We are so obsessed with the story of our past, that we believe that since this is always the way we have acted in the past, we will always act this way in the future.

But think seriously about this. I am now fifty six years old. I am not the same person I was at the age of five or ten or twenty or thirty or forty or even fifty. Likewise, I will not be the same person at sixty or seventy or eighty. Not only that, but it would be impossible to remain the same person during these personal epochs even if I tried. Yet, that doesn’t stop so many of us from believing that we are trapped in the inevitability of our own histories. The past determines our present. Our present then determines our future.

Such a concrete view of ourselves is a drearily reassuring myth. I might be a miserable bug trapped in the amber of my past, but I am a familiar one, absolved of the responsibility for my present or my future. No quantum leaps or cataclysmic interruptions in my personal history can disturb my glum equilibrium. The archetype of this wretchedness can be found in the Tarot Card of “The Devil”. Adam and Eve are chained to a stone block upon which perches the Devil. But, look carefully at this couple and you see that the chains are loosely draped around their necks. Either of them, at any moment, could easily slip the chain over their heads if they only slightly exerted their will.

Our power is never found in the past or the future. Our personal power is rooted in the immediate present. I often hear my clients counter: “Well, what about the choice I made eighteen years ago to get married? I’m still stuck with that decision.” That may be true. However, I will counter: “You might have made the decision to get married and have kids eighteen years ago. And, for every day, hour and minute for the last eighteen years, you have made the decision to stay married. At any moment in the present or in the future, you could choose otherwise."

If you want to change, your ability to change lays in the present moment. We can get so obsessed about our past histories that we allow our past to limit our decisions about the present and future. When we wish to change, the question really isn’t: How did I get here?” Instead it should be: “What am I choosing to become?”