How Do You Thrive In A Shocking and Difficult World?

Transformation and Self-Mastery Trump "External" Solutions

Is There Room To Be Hopeful?

War. Weak leadership. Divisiveness. Civil breakdown.

I probably don’t need to mention how chaotic and overwhelming things are in the world these days. 

Things need to change. But how do little people like us change the world?

There are many ways to think about how to fix things “out there”.

But I suggest that it’s even more essential that we all learn to take hold of ourselves “inside”. 

To heal, evolve, and empower ourselves to be the best humans we can be. 

And by bringing more sanity and light to ourselves, we elevate ourselves and we elevate the world.  

One of the key abilities we need is to remember our own potential and learn to express it as best we can.  

Why? Because you and every one of us have a purpose. And the quality and meaning of your life is less dependent on your external circumstances than on living with purpose and meaning. 

This idea is brought home by Victor Frankl. He was a psychiatrist who survived the horrors of Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp. His awesome observation was that there was a primary difference between the people who survived that hell, and the ones who shriveled and didn’t make it. The survivors found meaning in the situation. They turned the horror and suffering into an opportunity to serve others or to connect to some kind of future purpose. They found meaning in the depths of suffering. Sometimes through their capacity to be generous, connected, and loving. Sometimes by staying focused on some kind of purpose and meaning that transcended the difficult circumstances. 

When you empower yourself to be awake, clear, giving, wise, and purposeful, you gain a sense of stability and meaning that helps you endure difficulties. And you make your corner of the world a better place. 

How Do You Stay Awake, Clear, and Purposeful When Everything Is a Mess?

Your ability to be awake, clear, wise, and purposeful starts with you.

It’s an inside job. You have the strength inside of you. We all do. Sometimes it’s hidden under layers of pain and heartbreak. Sometimes you need help finding that strength.  

It’s a process of healing. Growth. Transformation. And it's a Return to the potential and purpose with which you came into this world.

Over the past decades of serving people with chronic pain and illness, I’ve gotten clear that this growth process is an integrated body-mind-spirit thing. The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of your being are all involved. And as I enter this new phase of my professional and personal life, I’m on fire with the mission of helping more people in the process of healing, growth, and transformation.

The same tools of self-healing that are so relevant and helpful to chronic pain and illness are also invaluable under times of stress and change. Mind-body skills are life skills. They can connect you to your inner wisdom and make space so that wisdom can be expressed. So you can navigate the challenges with more clarity, calm, and gratitude.

You can glue yourself to a sense of clarity, balance, and even joyous confidence. It helps you surf the waves of difficulty that are part of life. And it helps you begin to dissolve the obstacles to expressing that wisdom in the world. In the process you gain clarity and strength. You start to emanate more confidence and love and light. And that ripples outwards to others and supports them.

Does that idea resonate with you in your life?

If so, then we need to talk about how to move in that direction.

First, let’s talk about a major mindset shift that can be astonishingly empowering.

Learning To Recognize and Accept the Polarity Inside of You

The sages say that there are two aspects to our beings. After decades of study and practice, I think they're right.

There are inner elements that seem to hold you back or stand in the way of growth. They are rooted in fear.

And there are the elements inside of you that fuel your growth. They are rooted in love.

Fear is the voice that says, “I need to protect myself and my needs. I don’t want to feel mental, emotional, or physical pain. I don’t want to change, I want to be safe. I’d rather hide here in the familiar stinky darkness than risk going forward into life with all of its vulnerabilities and potential for suffering”.  

The voice of fear is often quite subtle. It doesn’t blare its message on the loudspeaker. It speaks in the logic of your mind, because it lives in your mind.

Love is the voice that says, “I need to live, to express, to connect, to give. I want aliveness even if it means taking risks. I’m willing to grow and change because life and connection are so important”

I’ve met those forces in thousands of patients and clients. People whom I’ve counseled and guided around their recovery after catastrophic illness and injury. And people whom I've counseled around meeting the everyday challenges of being a soul in a body, and living with more vitality, purpose, and meaning.

One example is a person in my community who grew up in an environment of abuse and neglect. She spent her adolescence and most of her early adult life hiding from interaction with other people. She is a charismatic, brilliant, and creative person, who draws others like a magnet. But relationships were terrifying for her. She would make connections with people who felt like best friends at first, but she would quickly find a reason to shut down the friendship. 

At one point she got married because she wanted to have a child and have a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Suddenly she was stuck in a marriage with this horrifying thing called a “husband”. Every time he returned from work it evoked the terror of her childhood abuse. She would shut down, push him away, and sometimes act-out in anger.  

Fortunately, he saw what was happening and didn’t take her outbursts personally. He responded with patience and kindness.  She was very connected to an inner desire to mother her child and give the love that she didn't get when she was a child. She saw that her husband was a good man and she wanted to be in a relationship, even if she was scared of it. She did a huge amount of inner work to become conscious of her anger and the fear it was protecting.  She found tools to heal the inner pain. She began to take responsibility for the anger rather than projecting it outward.

In a remarkable and heroic journey of healing, she gradually opened to friendships, to intimacy, to life. 

It depended on her being in touch with the life instinct of love. And to also recognize the fear instinct. The parts of her that wanted to shut down and run away from the relationship.

Love and Fear On The Rehabilitation Unit

In my clinical work, the circumstances were much different than that woman's marriage and parenting. But the dance of love and fear was a core part of the process. 

Bill was a young business entrepreneur with a new wife and 2-year-old son. He was an avid club soccer player and coach for kids in his community. One day he fell while climbing, and tragically injured his spinal cord. He was rushed to a great hospital and had surgery to stabilize his spine and other injuries. But the neurological damage was done. He was suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. He had chronic pain and difficulty with mobility. The injury affected his sexual functioning.

As he progressed through the inpatient and outpatient rehabilitation process, the dynamic of fear and love was quite prominent.

On one side, he was highly motivated to build a family, to love his wife, to have more children, to build his business, and to give to his community.

Those are the expressions of the "love impulse"

But he was faced with so much pain and so many obstacles to all of those goals. It was overwhelming for him at times. Like suddenly at age 32 he was being asked to start his life over, without the physical potency and strength which were so fundamental to his previous identity.

He went through crises where he feared he would never function as the man he wanted to be. He was daunted by the realization that he could no longer be sexual with his wife. That their only hope for more children was through a technical approach to reproduction that bypassed his spinal injury. He had daily bursts of burning pain in his legs that made it hard to concentrate and function in his business. And he had near-daily bursts of anger at his situation and the frustration that he felt.

These are all aspects of the "fear impulse".

He experienced actual fear that he couldn’t overcome the obstacles. Fear of the loss of his manhood and sexual ability. Fear that he wouldn't be able to build his business and support his family. Loss of his joy of playing and coaching soccer. Wondering if he could be the father that his young son needed. Fear of the pain. These all trigger a tendency to shut down. To close off. Feelings of loss and despair. Thoughts of quitting and giving up. 

It was a difficult journey for Bill. He was in touch with his desire to live and grow and love. And he was stumbling with the challenges of loss and fear.

Part of his work was to meet the fearful and difficult feelings, to heal them, to transform them into motivation and strength. It meant letting go of certain parts of himself and discovering strengths that he didn't know he had.

Bill’s story is similar to that of many people with whom I’ve worked. One of the common themes among all of them is that they had, so to speak, “hit a wall” and lost much of their capacity to function. Many were facing persistent pain and great uncertainties about their future health or functional ability.  Their previous identity was no longer able to express itself. They had to go through a “dark night of the soul” where things looked bleak, hopeless, and overwhelming.

In a crisis like that, many things become more clear.

And this polarity of love and fear often reveals itself.

On one side there is an impulse toward life, growth, and expression.

And on the other side, there is the opposite of that. 

Fear and Love In The Time of Societal Instability

The polarity of love and fear isn’t limited to those who have had a catastrophic illness or injury. We are all facing it regularly. Though often on a more subtle (or more dramatic) level.

There is a place inside all of us that is concerned with safety on a physical, emotional, and mental level. It’s based on fear. It easily brings us to sadness, anger, and despair. It worsens physical or emotional pain. It evokes protective thoughts and behaviors that can help in the short term, but harm us in the long term. The fear-impulse can push us into an endless cycle of grief or numbing-out with drugs, alcohol, or endless distractions like internet scrolling.  The fear-impulse drives the biology of stress, which feeds back into the mental/emotional state of fear.

And there is a place inside that wants to live. It wants to reconnect to life. To express life, to give, to serve. Sometimes the person doesn’t know how and they are overwhelmed by the fear and its negativity. But the impulse to life is there. It’s sourced in love. It’s evoked by beauty, creativity, understanding, compassion, purpose, and meaning. Nearly everyone I’ve met has had at least a flicker of that inner light. And with the right attention and action, it grows into a flame.

And at every moment, deep inside, there is the possibility of choosing one or the other. 

Love or Fear. 

In my thinking, one of the most important things you can do is learn to master these two aspects of yourself.  In the depths of it, they’re not enemies. They are potential partners in the dance of life. Our fear-impulse is there to serve a purpose. It is ultimately meant to serve the love-impulse and not overwhelm or destroy it.

The sages liken the fear-impulse to a horse. It is physically powerful and has valuable instinctual intelligence.  And they liken the love-impulse to the rider of the horse. It is less physically powerful but has intellectual intelligence and qualities, including understanding, insight, vision, creativity, compassion, and generosity. 

The idea is that the rider is in charge and tells the horse where to go. 

Learn to keep your love-impulse in the saddle, and ride the horse of the fear-impulse.

That is a huge part of the art of living a meaningful life. 

It’s an integral part of how we strengthen ourselves to face the challenges in our own lives and the challenges of the world around us.

Mastering the dance of fear and love is a key to transforming stress and confusion into resilience and clarity.

Transforming the Meeting-Place of Body, Mind, and Soul

The process of transforming challenges into vitality and positivity is rich and complex. 

My experience and perspective is that we can contact the love-impulse in our hearts and soul and mobilize it to empower us. It empowers us to stay connected to our vision, meaning and purpose. And it can be brought to the fear-impulse like a powerful medicine. On a spiritual level, the fear impulse exists to serve the love impulse. The love impulse can transform the fear impulse. Compassionately, training the horse to serve the rider.

In the next post, I’ll unpack the two impulses from a slightly different perspective and start to think about how the bodily responses are intimately connected to these movements of mind and soul. And that will pave the way to discuss practical strategies for this vital inner work of growth and healing. 

And that's the vital inner work that can help you relate to difficult situations and transform yourself and your surroundings.

In the meantime, I’m curious to hear your thoughts about what I’ve shared above. 

What resonates as true? What seems confusing or untrue?

Feel free to comment. And sign up if you want to get notification about new posts.

I will read your response. And I will try to respond.

Thanks and have a great day.

Wishing you well.

Andrew David Shiller, MD