Wake up and live (FB 'live" recording)

Hi there, it's Mary Shiller, author and coach of MaryShiller.com, and I wanted to jump on here live for a few minutes today. I haven't done a Facebook Live in a while and something was on my mind, and so I thought maybe what I have to say can be helpful to someone today. So I'm just getting ready to go out on one of my typical daily meanderings here in Paris where I live. It is Sunday and it's right now about 12:30, so I expect that there will be lots of other folks out and about because the weather is cool still, but it's sunny, which is rare here in Paris. Believe it or not, I consider Paris to be sort of a gray city in terms of weather. It tends to be kind of overcast, but today it is sunny. So I'm going to go take advantage of that. I may go over to the Centre Georges Pompidou, which is the modern art museum. I have a membership there and I love going there and seeing all of the amazing art and just enjoying the space. It's a really beautiful space and honestly has one of the most amazing views of Paris from anywhere. So that's worth the time and the price of admission for sure. So I made a post this morning on my Facebook page that I titled A Wake Up Call. And what happened was last night, right before I went to bed, I think it was last night, my mind has been a bit of a fog since I saw this post, so I honestly can't remember if it was last night or this morning. That tells you kind of what happened to me. I saw a post by one of my dearest friends in the world. Sorry, hang on. I saw a post by one of my dearest friends in the world, somebody I have known for, gosh, 20-something years now. And we have been very close friends and it just means the world to me. They were involved in a really terrible accident where the car caught on fire, not because of anything my friend had done, but it was something that had gone wrong and there was an electrical fire in the car. And there was video footage from the news of the car and it was quite shocking because— oh, that's my cat. The car was just completely totaled. I mean, just burned turned up and just awful. And my friend managed to escape but has burns on one side and is in a burn unit in California. And obviously, when I first saw this, my natural response— hi, Rachel— was to be upset because I just couldn't get over what had happened. And then it took me a while for the reality of this to kind of sink in. And if I get teary, you're going to have to just bear with me. And I hope that the message I'm sharing today is worth it. You know, we hear all the time that, you know, we should live each day to the fullest and, you know, we only have now and we should live in the moment and We, you know, we never know when it's going to be our time to go and all of those things. And of course, you know, we are all going to die at some point. It's not like we're going to live forever. But the reality that my friend could have been taken from this earth in such a horrific way that was not in their control at all just really hit home in a hard sense and really kind of woke me up again. I have lost people that I've known in sudden ways. No one super close to me, but I did many, many years ago, back in the '90s, lose some people in a car accident who I knew. And that was quite a shock. And I think that anytime we are faced with a sudden loss or a sudden potential loss, like me with this dear friend of mine, it kind of wakes you up, right? And it's unfortunate that that kind of thing has that effect that almost we need that sort of thing to wake us up. And so before you have to go through anything like that, I'm hoping that what I'm saying right now is maybe having the effect of waking you up. I was essentially sleepwalking through my life for about 30 years, and I say that I was sleepwalking because I was really living much of the time in a space in my head that was very dark. It was filled with, excuse me, traumatic memories. It was filled with fear, anxiety, not just like garden-variety anxiety but post-traumatic stress disorder type anxiety where You're constantly on alert. You're constantly vigilant. You're constantly on edge. Pardon me. And I didn't know that there was any other way for me to live. I thought that that was the way that I was going to experience life because of some traumatic things that had occurred. Some violent things that had occurred to my person, etc. And it wasn't until a few years ago that I woke up from that sleepwalking sensation, that kind of stupor that I had been in, and realized that in actuality I had unwittingly been doing that to myself. I had been blaming that condition on the person who perpetrated violence against me. But in reality, the suffering and the sleepwalking— hi, Ingrid— that I had been experiencing all those years was coming from within me because I hadn't seen that person in person for, you know, a really long time. And I thought, well, how can that person still be causing me this distress then? If they're not even around, they're not even part of my life in any way, how is it possible for that person to be creating this sense that I'm having that I'm not fully awake, that I'm not fully alive? And I realized that that person was not responsible for the state that I was in. I was responsible for that. Not through any misdeeds or through being stupid or through anything like that, but simply not recognizing that I didn't have to live in that space if I decided I didn't want to. So I woke up. I said, you know, I am really bored with the way my life looks. I'm really bored and frustrated and done with living in fear all the time and feeling really stressed all the time and not feeling like myself. I don't want that anymore. So anytime those kinds of feelings would come over me, I would just kind of go, okay, whatever, there they are, so what, what else can I go do? And that small thing changed everything for me, absolutely everything. I saw that I could have any feeling, even what we might label as the worst feeling of grief or like I said, this extraordinarily powerful sense of vigilance for our safety. We can have any strong feeling we want to have, you know, that comes in and we can be just fine. We can still function. We can still create. We can still feel alive, that those feelings that we place so much importance on and we blame other people for causing, you know what? They just don't matter. Those feelings that look like they're stopping you, those thoughts that look like they're stopping you, you know what? They're not. They're absolutely not. And you know how I know this? Because I can look back on my life and I can see that during those 30 years when I was kind of sleepwalking in this PTSD headspace, I was still doing stuff. I was still creating things. I was making friends. I was having, you know, pretty good professional life. I was a good mom. Still am, but whatever, you know, I was still— things were still happening. So that was all the proof I needed to recognize that, you know, the only thing that really needed to change from my perspective was that I woke up to the fact that if I was feeling suffering, I was creating that. I was creating that. And I didn't want to create that anymore, so I said, "No, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm done with suffering. Done. I don't need it. It doesn't need to be part of my life anymore." So whenever those feelings would come over me— Oh, cool, Rachel. So whenever those feelings would come over me that used to feel like they were making me suffer, I would just kind of wave at them and go, yeah, hey, I recognize you, whatever. You know, you can be there, you can hang out, you can do whatever you want, I don't care. I'm gonna go do my thing. And so I became more of a consciously alive person. I was alive all those years. I wasn't actually asleep. But becoming conscious of the fact that that suffering was being caused by me listening to stuff and kind of buying into it, and then deciding not to do that, that's what kind of brought me to real life, I would call it. That's what helped me to wake up. And it was literally as simple as this. I'll say it as simply as I can. If you are suffering, stop listening to thinking that says it's somebody else's fault because it's not. I want you to take responsibility in the most amazing, loving, beautiful way possible and recognize that every feeling of suffering you have is coming from yourself. And you know what I want you to do with those feelings? I want you to wrap your arms around them and say, "I love you, all you feelings. Thank you so much for giving me this amazing experience of being human. You're welcome here. You're not doing me any harm because you can't hurt me." I'm much bigger than any thought or feeling I have, and that includes the ones that used to create a feeling of suffering. So embrace all of them and realize they're not doing anything to you. You don't have to wrestle with them. You don't have to try to throw them to the ground or let them go or anything. They're just going to be there. And you can peacefully coexist and consciously live even with those feelings, okay? I see so many people in my line of work, amazing people. I mean, like, some of the most incredible people I have met in my entire life, I have met since becoming a coach a few years ago. They continually are looking at thoughts as though they are standing in their way of something. And the only thing that's ever, quote, standing in our way is absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. You know, the typical conversation is telling us that we have to do stuff with all this thought. We can't. I can't control the thoughts that come into my head, and I've never met another person who can, ever. It's just not possible. What I can do though is I can wake up to that fact, A, that they're not controllable, and B, I can wake up to the fact that they don't need to be. They don't need to be. We don't need to worry about having those thoughts and feelings anymore. They can all be there, and we can still go and do what we want to do. We can still go live the way that we want to live. There's absolutely nothing that you have to jump over, go around, dissolve, nothing. It's all an illusion. And so I get really frustrated because the, again, the normal kind of psychological and self-help conversations are so far off the mark. I love all those people for trying. But after spending, you know, my entire adult life going through therapy and self-help programs and getting absolutely nowhere, what finally helped me was waking up to the fact that I was okay. There was nothing wrong with me. I was like every other human being out there. I was having some thoughts that created these momentary feelings, and I was looking at them so intensely and thinking there was something terribly wrong with me for having them that that was what was causing my suffering. And my suffering ended just like that when I realized the truth about who and what you and I actually are. Hi, Rachel. Yes, that was a turning point for me, knowing in my bones I couldn't control the thoughts and then I didn't need to. Once I had that insight, everything changed. That's really cool, Rachel. Really, really cool. Because, you know, I think that we are so used to this normal conversation that is taking place in the media and in books and everywhere that is saying, you know, there's something terribly wrong with us, with everyone basically. And, you know, there's all this work that we have to do on ourselves. Well, the message of this live video today is to wake up from that stupor. Wake up from that stupor. It is not true. It is simply not true. And like, like I did, you can prove it to yourself. You can prove it. And this is what I did for probably the first 2 years after I started to see this, is I kept looking for evidence. I kept looking for proof that I was okay. And I would look back on all those years, even in my first marriage, which was— I kind of alluded to— which was incredibly violent and abusive. I can see even when I was in all of that and, you know, really seeing things in a very strange way, I was able to do a lot of cool stuff. I had my daughter and I started raising her. I had friends. I didn't see them all that often because of the kind of control issues that my first husband had, but I still had friends. I was really good at design. I did a lot of things in our home back then that were pretty amazing, I think. I had jobs and I was, you know, very creative and smart and all those things. And then after I left that marriage, I was still being able to create things even though I was looking at life through this lens of post-traumatic stress disorder, which is, you know, very distorted way of kind of experiencing things. I was still creating things. I went to graduate school, got 2 more degrees, so that made 3 altogether. I had really good jobs. I had good relationships. I got remarried. To a wonderful, wonderful man. I continued raising my daughter who's now grown, have great relationship with her. All of those things were still happening and that was my evidence that my life literally and your life is the evidence that you are actually okay and that you don't need to do any work on yourself. The only thing that really helps is waking up to that simple fact, is that there's nothing wrong with you. You are a normal human being because you have thought, and thought gives us this incredible human experience we're having in all its colors and variations. And gosh, wouldn't it be crazy, literally crazy, if we only all experienced one emotion all the time? That's not how we're made. That's not how we're made. And, you know, the fact that, that I have interacted with so many people over the past few years who have had incredible lives and are still living in this space of there's something wrong with me, it's kind of heartbreaking, honestly. Kind of heartbreaking because I would love everyone to— oops, hang on, one cat's going to leap onto another one, that wouldn't be good. Yeah, you have to go down here, sweetie. You know, it would be amazing if everyone could wake up to this truth. I don't know even what the world would look like if that were possible, but you know, I know what it's done for me. What it has done for me I'll just explain this a little bit. Is I kind of woke up to this now almost 5 years ago. And in that 5 years, lots of stuff has happened as life does, things happen, including my father-in-law, my dear, dear father-in-law who I loved so much, passing away. And, you know, some other personal things like that. Losing a job, which was quite interesting. I hadn't had that happen before. Starting a whole new career from literally zero or less than zero and managing to create a business that I really love. I just enjoy so much what I do every day. I was able to move to this beautiful city of Paris where I had wanted to live since I was 19. Took me a while to get here, but I made it. So my circumstances have shifted gradually over that time. But what has shifted even more than that, which, you know, circumstances and all that stuff are kind of meaningless if you're living in a state of sleepwalking. And the way to wake up is not necessarily to have a wake-up call like a friend almost dying or you almost dying or some major event like that happening. We don't need something like that to wake us up. What we need is somebody to tell us the truth, which is that we don't need to be, how do I put this? We don't need to live in this state of defensiveness. We don't need to be some kind of warrior going through life, you know? We don't need to. Be constantly knocking down walls and building up other ones and trying to isolate ourselves from people and things that we think are going to hurt us. We can make change in this world a lot more easily, it seems to me, if we all start to recognize that we're fine just the way we are and that I don't need you to be a certain way, to behave a certain way in order for me to feel better. None of that has to happen. When I took responsibility for my own suffering and saw that I had unwittingly been creating it for myself, that was probably one of the most amazing moments of my life. I'd say that and the birth of my daughter were probably the two biggest events of my entire life. Because I realized that to end my suffering, I already had. By seeing that it was coming from me, it was over. That was it. It was over. Because any feeling after that that seemed like suffering, I was like, oh, right, that's passing thought, a feeling that's going to move on in a minute. I don't need to worry about it. I can go do what I want to do anyway. The suffering was over. So, you know, I have struggled to convey that in a way that some people grasp because I'm going to be just brutally honest with you here. Having been through domestic violence and, you know, being part of that conversation for a little while, you know, some people see that as me— see what I'm saying right now as me, you know, shifting the blame from him to me. And that is so not what I am saying. It's— I don't even really know how to address that because I'm not talking about his behavior. I'm not excusing his behavior. I'm not saying that people have free rein to go around, you know, choking people and raping them and trying to kill them. And, you know, I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying though is that anything that I felt in terms of suffering beyond that was coming from me because he wasn't even here. He wasn't in the room with me. I hadn't talked to him in decades by that point. Or let's see, how many years had it actually been? When I came across this, I hadn't seen him for 14 years. No, 13 years. And I was still suffering. So, you know, I'm not talking about behaviors that are unacceptable. What I'm talking about is reclaiming, if you will, this notion that we are actually responsible for what's going on here. But that whatever is going on here is actually fine. It's all working beautifully. So any feeling that comes through us, to me, is like a gift. I don't care what it is anymore. I don't care if I feel stressed. I don't care if I feel grief. I don't care what the feeling is. I want them all. I have woken up to what life is. And it's not about controlling feelings. It's not about saying, oh, you've been sad for too long. So now you're depressed and you have a problem. That's not what this life is about. This life is about experiencing everything. It's about experiencing every feeling that comes through us, every single one and being like, yes, I am alive, I am here, and I'm feeling this, and I want it. Bring it on. Bring it on. Wake up and bring it on. What else is life for? Is it for sitting around feeling like you're a loser because you've been depressed? No. It's feeling whatever you feel and being like, that's fine. Whatever it is, it's fine. You know, I felt like a loser for 30 years. I felt like I was a complete and utter failure at life. For 3 decades, I woke up every morning and felt like a failure. And I'm telling you that that was the most horrific way to experience life than one could imagine. I felt like a failure on every single level. When I woke up to the truth, when I woke up to the fact that that feeling of failure was simply me listening to repetitive thinking and going, "Yeah, Mary's a failure. Yeah, I agree." I was like, "What am I doing? What am I doing? I don't need to listen to that. I don't like it. I don't want to listen to that." You know, it's going to be there. It can say what it wants. That's fine. But I don't need to be like, "Oh, I totally agree with you." I don't need to go there. You know, it's— because it's not like I never have those thoughts and feelings anymore. I have them all the time. I was just yesterday, I said to my husband, "I feel like a failure." And he's like, "Ah, that'll pass." And I was like, yeah, you're right. Oh well, I'll just go. And so I went to this coworking space nearby and did some work. And I was like, okay, it's cool. I can feel like a failure and I can still sit here and create things that I think will be helpful to people. It's all right. So, you know, we, we just have this sense that, that everything is beyond our control and including our thoughts and our feelings, and we have to do all this stuff in order to be a good person, to be a whole person. Well, my biggest message to you today is to wake up out of that ridiculousness, you know, and just realize that you don't need anything. You have everything. You know, you may lack knowledge here and there, and that's fun to go get. I enjoy learning things, but you yourself are totally fine, totally whole, totally fine. Okay, thanks, Summer. And that even when you have feelings that look like they're a problem, they're not. So you don't need to go down that road anymore. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of time. You know, if I, if I think about all of the people that I have interacted with and all of the things that I used to do to try to manage my feelings so that I could go do something, I mean, I could have accomplished a lot more if I had woken up to this sooner. You know, if I had one tinge of regret in my life, it would be that. But, you know, I just want people to stop working on themselves in this way because you don't need to. And then go out and do something. You know, stop worrying about whatever state of mind you're in. Stop worrying that you don't have clarity. Stop waiting for insight. Stop, you know, don't even go down that road. You don't need to. Go do something. Go do something. Wake up and live. Go live. Go do the things that you want to do because you can do them no matter what state of mind you're in, no matter what your feelings are. They don't matter. They're simply the paints that are coloring your experience right now, but they don't have control over you. 'Cause you are not that experience you're having. That is not who and what you are. I see this conversation about empowerment and things, and I think, what a crock of crap. We don't need to be empowered. We are the power. Who do you think is empowering us? We are, because we already have it. I want people to wake up and stop wasting all this precious time trying to fix something that's not broken. Stop trying to fix something that's not broken, and then your suffering will end just like that. Immediately, it will stop because you'll see that this struggle you're having is pointless because there's nothing to be fixed. There is nothing to be fixed. We have all these judgments around good feelings and bad feelings and wanted feelings and unwanted feelings as if, you know, I use this metaphor as if we could say that certain colors on the spectrum were wanted or unwanted. So, you know, I want more blue in my life but not as much red. You know, I only like the sky when it's that color, not when it's that color. I mean, how ridiculous is that? It's ridiculous. We don't need to buy into that conversation anymore because it's not the truth. It simply isn't. And I want to say also from the deepest place of myself that I appreciate every single person who tried to help me over the years from a professional standpoint. I really do appreciate what they were trying to do. They were just looking in the wrong direction. If they turned their head a degree this way, they would see things so differently and really be able to help so many more people. So that's another part of waking up that I truly wish would happen. So I think I will close out this video by saying this Facebook Live. Thanks for being here if you join me live, and thanks for watching the replay. By saying that, you know, today's wake-up call for me in seeing the fact that I almost lost a dear friend of mine so suddenly and so brutally, and I'm so grateful that they're alive to tell the story because it's— it would— it was really, I think, just some kind of miracle that they got out of that burning car with their life intact. But what woke— what my wake-up call was that, you know, there is so much life to be lived. And so many of us are looking at our day-to-day emotional fluctuations and thinking that that's what life is. And it just isn't that. We all know this. Life is so much larger than that. And we are built absolutely perfectly. If you haven't watched the series on Netflix called Our Planet, I really urge you to do it because, to do so because whenever I see programs like that that show the beautiful, the beautiful, symmetry and symbiotic relationships in nature, you know, I think to myself, well, I am that too. You know, we are not separate from that. We are that as well. So when you see how the natural world is connected like this, perfectly blended together and working so beautifully together, well, what do you think we are? Do you think we're somehow outside the circle looking in? That we don't actually function perfectly too? Because we function perfectly even when it looks like we don't, even when the cultural conversation has evolved to the point where supposedly every single one of us has multiple neuroses going at once. I don't want you to buy into that about yourself. I want you to wake up and stop sleepwalking through life listening to that conversation. It can still continue after you're awake, but it has a whole different sound to it. Instead, it sounds more like some gentle background noise, like a stream running in the background. And you can start listening to what's real. And you can start acting on what's real instead of, in my mind, what is a total lie, was a total fabrication. I want you to wake up and live. I want you to go do something today, today, that you've been wanting to do for a long time. I want you to go through your day and Whatever feelings come up, just sit with them and realize that they are amazing because they're giving you this incredible experience of being a living human being. What more could you ask for? What more could you want? So I hope that this has been helpful for, for you today. And I would love to hear your thoughts and comments. If you'd like to leave a comment here, that would be lovely. Or if you'd like to get in touch with me, please do. I'd love to hear from you. It's mary@marieschiller.com. Have a wonderful day. I think I'm going to go, like I said, to the Centre Georges Pompidou perhaps, or I may just wander the streets and get lost like I often do here in Paris. Have a wonderful day and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.