Never Try to Solve the Impossible - Episode 15

Awareness That Heals, Episode 15.

A friendly mind doesn't try to be a master, it's trying to be a servant.

The Awareness That Heals podcast helps its listeners learn to develop the capacity to have a more healing response to emotions and situations rather than becoming stuck. Your host, Robert J. Strock, has practiced psychotherapy for more than 45 years. He wrote the book Awareness That Heals: Bringing Heart and Wisdom to Life's Challenges to help develop self-caring and the capacity to respond in an effective way to life's challenges, especially at times when we are most prone to be critical or to withdraw. Together, we will explore how to become aware of our challenging feelings and at the same time find alternative ways to live a more fulfilling and inspiring life.

I'd like to give you all a very warm welcome today as we continue with our deepening understanding of Friendly Mind. And again, joining us today are two of my dearest friends, Dave and Shelley. Dave is co-president of Global Bridge Foundation, and Shelley's a board member and therapist. And we'll also be including Mark, who's our engineer, but even more important than that in this case— although it's important as an engineer, we wouldn't have a show, uh is that he's developed a deep core relationship to Friendly Mind and might contribute today as well because he's had a depth experience that's really brought him to a keen appreciation and practice of using Friendly Mind. So in the last episode, we just covered the importance of making our realistic best efforts as a really central part of friendly mind. And really what that means and what really came out in the last episode is oftentimes we need to start off with a question of, am I really making my realistic best efforts in this situation when I feel really bad or I'm in a situation that's really difficult? And it does require us to notice our most challenging feelings, which is what provokes the question. And that's not automatic in our culture. So this really is asking you, as you're listening to this, to go into your own inner practice and say, what are my deepest challenging feelings or situations? And is this a place where I really have started to practice a friendly mind or maybe on Midway, and have been doing it for a while with different names. The other key point that we really covered is friendly mind is definitely not a free ride. It's not just putting frosting on top of garbage. It's not just saying, gee, you're a good guy, right after you were not a good guy, or girl for that matter, or a woman for that matter. So today what we're going to focus on is a key, key part also of Friendly Mind, which is not trying to solve the impossible. And it sounds intuitively, probably for most of you out there, well, I don't try to solve the impossible too often. But hopefully, as you listen to this episode, it'll be clear, just like everybody else I know in my life, including myself, there's a strong tendency, especially when you get older and you're not what you used to be in some area of performance, you're still laying those standards on yourself and you're trying to do the impossible. And you need to refocus yourself to do what is really doable in the next few minutes, the next hour, And the tendency in life is to go so far in the future that even if you had a friendly mind access, it couldn't help you because you're trying to solve a problem that's not going to happen for a year or 6 months or 2 months, and you've got plenty to just to deal with on your plate today. So one example of that is a woman named Maria who had 3 spinal surgeries and was very heavily medicated on fentanyl, which some of you may know is one of the most dangerous killers in our world today, which wasn't known when she had that surgery. When I had conversations with her, she would say to me over and over again, I just want to be able to walk. And I just want to be able to remember what I could remember before. And I would say to her, you've just had 3 very difficult spinal surgeries. You're on a very heavy drug. And so can you see that you're trying to do the impossible? And you might want to focus on When you get out of bed and you have somebody holding you, do you really want to concentrate on the next step? The— literally, as you put your foot on the ground and see if you can take 3 steps with help, or 1, or 5, or 10. That's friendly mind, not trying to do the impossible. But focusing on the present or the very near future. Now, the two other stories that I'm going to mention that are basically the same theme, but it's so important because almost all of us, and probably all of us that live a full set of years into our 70s, are going to face something like this if we haven't already. Where we lose capacity. And what we keep wanting is that capacity back. I want that capacity back and we can't get it back. So it's a way of really doing harakiri. It's like sticking a knife in ourselves every time we do it. We don't think we're doing it. We think we're wanting something that's really good for ourselves. But what we're really wanting is to change the reality of life And we absolutely cannot do that. So this second woman had a stroke, and all she wanted to do was to be able to talk because she had lost her speech and had aphasia after having the stroke. So we had a number of conversations. Well, well, what can you do? And it would keep going back around and around to that. And finally We got to, gee, could you focus on your speech therapy? Could you focus on your best efforts? And could you focus on your frustration, your helplessness, your pain, and learning how to have friendly mind care for those feelings? And still and still, you to make your best efforts to utter a word and recognize you're not the same as, as you used to be in your brain because you had a stroke. Do you understand that? And that led to a whole series of dialogues over several years where he was one of the more successful people at really being able to use her friendly mind with her emotional states and stay much more focused on what was really possible for her. Third person, again a woman, suffered from lifelong anxiety, was born with it, had a chemical condition. And her response was always, I hate my anxiety. I can't stand it. I can't believe that I feel this way. And I'm just— I'm so pissed off that I feel this anxious feeling. Again, trying to solve the impossible. And as you're listening to this, please apply it to your situation. Whatever area of life where you might have something going on where it's difficult and it's not quote, capital S solvable, but you may be able to take crucial baby steps and you might be able to say some things to yourself that will support you emotionally. So for her, it was, are you doing everything you can to deal with this anxiety? And the— at first, the answer was, I think so. And as we explored it further, she hadn't explored medications. And then she explored medications, and it took the edge off the anxiety, and now she was just a little bit anxious, but she was still upset with herself. That she was a little bit anxious. And then she would ask the question after that, am I doing everything I can? And it was, yeah, actually I am. Can you feel it? Can you feel better? Answer was no, I can't. I still feel, I still feel a little bit anxious and I want it to go away. And then the next question was, is that realistic? Do you have a Harry Potter wand or a magic wand to take away the little bit of anxiety? Because when you experimented with a little bit more medications, you were bombed out. So you don't have any other chemical alternatives. You tried therapy, you tried meditation, you tried acupuncture, and there were no more efforts other than an internal job, which was Friendly Mind. And after an extended period of time, she started to say, you know what, I really am doing everything I can, and I'm sorry that you can't feel, but I know you intuitively understand. You have an inner knowing that you're doing everything you can. And then Friendly Mind would say, is that right? Because Friendly Mind doesn't try to be a master. Is trying to be a servant. And she would say, yes, I do understand. And that pretty well became a constancy which through time allowed her to be a little bit more accepting and certainly a lot less judgmental than she had been.

So, as always, thank you for the opportunity to be here, for the opportunity to share. And these 3 stories hit home. And as I relate it to myself, and I relate it to the way I evolved, which was more outward more looking to solve impossible problems others had, particularly health problems. What came to me as you were speaking is my younger brother, who was one of the very first people in 1980 with what was then an unknown and eventually gay disease, ARC, HIV. AIDS illness. And we lived in separate parts of the world, eventually separate parts of the country. And when I came into his life, when he was more or less about halfway through a very long time, there were from, from no drugs to, to some, some treatments. It became my mission to see if I could figure this out. I mean, imagine the impossibility. As I look back on it, I, I kind of cry and laugh at my belief that I could actually heal him, that I could actually do something that would profoundly change the course of this illness that was a worldwide issue. And as I did that, I mean, this is a time in my life when I look back and I have regret. I look back and I say, okay, I made efforts on his behalf, which ended up maybe prolonging his life in a way that he didn't want. And it was prolonged for another 10 years. And of course, other family members supported it, but I was the main driver of it. And it was impossible. It was no matter what, no matter what I tried and I, and I, and researched and again, put myself on overdrive to solve this serious illness of, of my brother. There was no way. That issue for me was very difficult. At that time in my life, I again was not so much— I was driven, but not so much through anxiety, but through just a desire to be the person that could heal. I failed, and I felt like a failure. I felt the friendly mind aspect of myself, such as it was then— and this is a while ago— was, you've done everything you possibly could. You've done everything anybody you know could possibly recommend. You have made every effort, and the outcome is not in your hands. But you made every effort. And please, please recognize that and see if you can find a way to relax into that and not be so attached to this outcome that is just not possible.

Yeah, and again, I assume that you probably could partially hear yourself emotionally and partially not because you were attached to him staying alive, and that a lot of your feelings were around that and trying to solve that on an ongoing basis. So even though you were miraculous, that still was not winning the main prize of anyone that's dying, because you want to help them survive. But one of the things I want to pick up on though that you said, which is a crucial, uh, oversight that many people make is you said it wasn't so much anxiety, it was a desire to help. And to me, that's another way of saying I suppressed the anxiety and I compensated immediately into a desire to help, and I lost sight of it, and I'm still lost sight of it. And so it's very important that the anxiety be given a lot of attention and care through friendly mind— and I don't mean caring vibrationally or energetically, I mean just, hey Dave, you are dedicating a third of your life now to this and you're very anxious, and if we care for you, might that help you find your balance more than just doing, doing, doing and researching, researching, researching, and doctoring, doctoring, doctoring, and checking in, checking in, checking in. Might that be a more balanced life for you if you consider yourself to be of equal importance?

And of course, looking back, there's just zero doubt both of those things are true.

Both—

it's true that that was a compensation for anxiety, ultimately my own personal fear for myself, mortality, and all the things that go with it. And certainly another regret is just the being with my brother as opposed to doing for my brother, and missing moments of just being with Dave, I so appreciate what you're saying on two levels.

One is that, and I think it's one of, I honestly think it's a mistranslation in the Buddhist to English Western world, which is, you know, suffering, attachment is suffering. And it's really attachment is attachment to outcome is really what is suffering. Exactly what you're talking about. And as it relates to that space of being with your brother, just being, and missing out on that in your attempt to save him, to help him, and how I think we all do that to a certain degree where we're just not really completely present with the person in the moment, and then subconsciously we know that's happening, so there's regret and guilt even as we're trying to help them. And I just, I think what you're saying right now is a really beautiful thing for people to pay attention to.

Appreciate that. Thank you.

And I underscore that and want to shift the focus a little bit to more ordinary elements of friendly mind, because it doesn't always require a life and death situation. As a matter of fact, much more often than not, it doesn't. So using a more common example, and again asking you as you listen to use your common example, let's just imagine that you are a non-communicator or you're a dumper and that you have a style of just telling somebody to screw off whenever you feel like it, or you never share your feelings, you don't share your needs, and you do it privately. And you're in one extreme or the other. And friendly mind is saying to you, as you see a trail of limited relationships or limited quality relationships, friendly mind's saying to you, you know, you're aware of feeling alone, or you're aware of feeling alienated, frustrated, helpless, misunderstood. Any of those feelings could be the baseline challenging emotion that you'd be starting with. And then you'd ask yourself, are you on the end of dumping your feelings? In a relationship, or are you in the area of suppressing your feelings? And where is the balance for you? That is such a courageous question. And almost invariably, unless somebody's in an intensive therapy or they happen to just be, uh, guess the word these days would be woke, uh, or a little bit awakened, or a little bit of a student, they would be just staying with their tendency until they die, and they won't be paying attention to those underlying feelings and then get to that great question of, do I need to communicate more so that I can be more intimate? Not because I should, but because it might add another piece of intimacy. Or do I need to contain myself a bit when I'm angry or frustrated because I hurt people and then they move away? Or a third option is, do I do both? And it depends on the person. And a lot of people, for example, will be very expressive emotionally with the people they're more attached to in their family or their loved one or their partner. And then with everybody else, they'll suppress their needs and their feelings, and that'll happen. So one of the questions that seems like a universal question that friendly mind would ask us is, what's my communication style? How satisfied am I within relationships, both personal relationships and friendships, family relationships? And Where might my balance be? And of course it could be beyond communication. It could also be involvement like Shelley was talking about earlier. You know, am I in balance? And it requires that critical awareness of our challenging emotions, going deep enough inside ourselves to even be awake enough to ask the question that is so fruitful if and when it's sincere. And a sign of it being sincere is that it's not that you ask a question every Sunday morning at 9 o'clock. It's something that really is living with you and you're really in a quandary. And the hard part about that is that it's so inbred, our tendencies are so lifelong, we have a tendency to believe it's normal. And we have all kinds of rationalizations of, well, this works for me, this is just my style. And we don't drop into the underlying feeling of aloneness or alienation or very happy to be distant or injuring other people. And so see where you might fall, not only in the area of relationships, it might also be in the area of money. It might also be in the area of success. Are you asking yourself the questions? Am I being the best self that I know how to be realistically in this area? And Am I focusing on something impossible like, well, I just want my relationships to all be better? Yeah, I really think that my relationship should be better and I'm in a dream of an impossible dream, but I'm not dropping to the deeper question that gives it a chance to be realistic. So as I'm saying these words, I don't know anyone— for me, I could almost go A through Z and come up with a starting point for an area in my life where the question would be worth asking. And when we ask this question, it becomes clear after a while when you're practicing friendly mind that it has your well-being and if it's even more mature, the well-being of others, and maybe even all others in mind, as to, am I trying to do something impossible, or am I asking the question that really gives me a chance to improve quality of life? So I have a friend, for example, that's living somewhere where he's really unhappy and he's constantly either just feeling he's unhappy or he's dreaming about a year from now, but he's not really staying present with how am I going to maximize my enjoyment this next month, this next week, today. He's trying to solve the impossible because he's feeling unhappy, he's aware he's unhappy, but then it flips to a year from now instead of flipping to the next hour. So those are the kinds of situations where friendly mind is invaluable because it keeps bringing you back to the present and the near future and doesn't have you get lost in an impossible dream of solving your future life. I want my money to be more secure so I have a retirement. Or I want to be more beautiful than I am, and when I go online, I want everybody to choose me. So just continue to ask these questions, and then when you get to the question that really resonates with you, see what your response is. And the deeper it goes, the more likely it is going to be a series of questions And then you answer the question, and then you ask another question. And most frequently, if you really bring it to the near future and the present and your best realistic efforts, then you're no longer in the impossible. So I think that gives us a very good sense of how we can get lost in the impossible And as always, super encourage you to look at the situations in your life where your mind has a tendency to dwell on the impossible. Maybe not impossible if you focus on the next hour, but completely impossible if you're focusing on a year from now. And as you discover it, Instead of going, oh shit, there I am doing it again, say to yourself, oh good, if you can. I'm discovering a possible way that I can improve my quality of life. And when you discover areas where your mind is dwelling on the impossible or you're being critical, be appreciative that you have the wisdom to want to bring yourself closer to the present and the near future. So I wish that for all of us. It's my prayer for me, for you, for everyone, for your neighborhood. And thanks so much for your attention.

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