I remember, years ago, taking the est training.
It was way back and certainly within the first decade of its infancy. I can remember any number of takeaways and many stay with me today.
As a matter of fact, I can probably say that the primary life drivers for my perception of reality today came from my mom and dad first. . . and the est training a very close second.
While there may not necessarily be an inclusive list, they are still some of the biggest in my life.
1. Do what you say you’re going to do . . . and nothing less.
2. Take 100% personal responsibility for every outcome in your life.
3. Saying and doing must be one and the same, or you rob yourself of your power over your own life.
And, my universal rules:
1. It is what it is.
2. This too shall pass.
3. Intentions do matter, but results rule.
All of that has become so incredibly ingrained in my very psyche that, along the way, as I built sand castles (sometimes stronger, sometimes not) on life’s shores, I never forgot the fundamental maxims ingrained in me in that intensive training years ago.
I’m thinking of that time now for lots of reasons.
One of the reasons is that I had the toughest time understanding, when I underwent those 60 hours of intensive training followed by multiple 10 hour intensives thereafter, that whole groups of people couldn’t cope with their pasts in ways which allowed them to shed themselves of the weight of accumulated years so that they could liberate themselves to move forward.
I just didn’t understand it. I didn’t get why it was so tough for them.
Of course, I was also a whole lot younger then and, while surrounded by people my age, I was also surrounded by people 10, 20 and 30 years older. They were the ones who tended to have the greatest problem.
But I’m now them.
It looks quite different from this angle. And the reason is not all that difficult to define.
It goes like this.
As each of us goes through life, we continue to append more and more data: raptures, ecstacies, emotions, ruptures, broken relationships, deaths, tragedies, failed dreams, broken promises, betrayals, and on, and on, and on . . . !
And as we process them through, the cumulative weight becomes tougher and tougher to bear. . . or shed.
In our younger years, while we have the inexperience of youth, we at least had the singleness of the event. Therefore, as long as we could clean up that event, process it through, get to the other side, we were ready for the next.
But the problem, as we get older, is that even if we do that, one event after another (after another after another) eventually bows us under the sheer weight of it all.
As I look back over these last years, I am awed by the sheer cumulative weight of the experiences I created and then lived through.
And I find myself today doing my very best to shed all of that massive weight as I step forward to rediscover the mojo and light-hearted strut that kept me so agile throughout my life.
I’ve learned that it isn’t all that easy. But there is a way. . .a process. . .I’ve learned to tap. Let me describe it.
1. Learn from, but nonetheless shed at any cost, the past: live joyfully in the present with a picture of the future you are now creating.
2. Passionately hold on to and incessantly defend your right to be the primary creative force of your own life and its future.
3. Formally reinforce that process daily in whatever way(s) is appropriate. Morning prayers; night time baths with a smooth glass of cognac; mid-day treadmill workouts; an evening run. Reinforce daily that process.
4. Be wise, but never be clever.
5. And defend yourself, but do that with as little harm to others as possible.
I’m not clear on whether all of that is enough. But I do intuitively understand that to make it through the last half of my life, I have to lighten the load I’m carrying along the way.