Humainologie creative dialogue and mountain climbing Wednesday April 6
- Arthur Clark
- Mar 31, 2022
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 1, 2022
“Make each day your masterpiece.” - John Wooden
Once a week write down at least three things you would love to experience or accomplish if you had no fear whatsoever. By the end of the week, do at least one. And that will change everything.
If you don’t believe it, here’s a TEDx talk
that might give you a fresh way of thinking about the potential importance of your life.
Our topic for creative dialogue on Wednesday April 6 is Transforming Self Sabotage into Self Mastery. It starts at 6:30 PM Calgary time.
We humans have been doing self sabotage for centuries. Recent examples include the US war in Vietnam; the US invasion of Iraq and overthrow of its government; the refusal of the US, Canada, and other NATO states to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. However, there are so many examples of human self-sabotage, from the personal to the global level, that we need some single point of focus to begin getting out of the trap.
Let’s start with ourselves.
We must be the change we want to see in the world. In her book The Mountain Is You, Brianna Wiest helps each of us to move from self-sabotage to self-mastery. I have appended herewith Part I of my synopsis of her book. I’ll send Part II before the dialogue next Wednesday.
Here are a couple of “good questions” to get the creative dialogue started:
Share with us which parts of the book synopsis you found especially interesting or useful, and why.
Bette Davis said “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” I think of it as climbing a mountain. “Touching the Void” is a mountaineering movie that has helped with my approach to old age. I can share some of the things I have figured out and we can brainstorm other ideas, including basic principles for climbing the mountain of old age.
We will all be better climbers by the end of April!
I should mention that this summer we can do an occasional creative dialogue out at Folk Tree Lodge. We can also meet person-to-person outdoors in Calgary from time to time.
Here is the Zoom link for April 6 provided by Shinobu:
Topic: Hurmainologie creative dialogue
Time: Apr 6, 2022 06:30 PM
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 824 9346 3628
Passcode: 12345
Arthur
Book: (Brianna Wiest, 2020) The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage into Self-Mastery (Part I of this synopsis)
In times when we are feeling “as though we’ve hit rock bottom,” it is often because circumstances have forced us to step outside our comfort zones. “The breakdown is often just the tipping point that precedes the breakthrough…. Just as a mountain is formed when two sections of the ground are forced against one another, your mountain will arise out of coexisting but conflicting needs.” This book is written for people who feel a need to transform themselves into something new. “The objective of being human is to grow.”
In Chapter 1, “The Mountain Is You,” Brianna Wiest looks into how a person can be in a crisis of their own making. “There is nothing holding you back in life more than yourself.” Why this self-sabotage? Then comes the author’s explanation of how and why. Your comfort zone is where you are comfortable. Something better may be waiting for you outside, but if you step outside, it will be unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. For example, you may lose friends and other comfort-zone things. However, “The greatest act of self-love is no longer to accept a life you are unhappy with.” Instead, start by writing down the things about yourself you want to change. Then, she insists, focus on those things and resolve to change them once and for all. She concludes Chapter 1 by driving home the point that “your new life is going to cost you your old one.” But something better is waiting on the other side.
In Chapter 2, “There’s No Such Thing as Self-Sabotage,” she opens with this: “When you habituate yourself to do things that move your life forward, you call them skills. When they hold you back, you call them self-sabotage. They are both essentially the same function.” Elsewhere she adds: “There is no such thing as self-sabotage because the behaviors…[that] are holding you back are [also] meeting your needs.” What we call self-sabotage occurs when we know the goal we’d like to reach, but we fail to take the steps necessary for moving toward the goal. “Procrastinating puts you back in a place of self comfort.” She adds: “It might seem totally counterintuitive, but we are not really wired to be happy; we are wired to be comfortable, and anything that is outside of that realm of comfort feels threatening or scary until we are familiar with it.” Therefore, Brianna Wiest advises: “Instead of shocking yourself into big changes, allow yourself to slowly adjust and adapt. By taking it slow, you are allowing yourself to gradually reinstate a new comfort zone around what you want your life to be.” Wiest lists a series of sometimes subtle signs that you are in a cycle of self-sabotage, including this one: “You spend more of your time worrying, ruminating, and focusing on what you hope doesn’t happen than you do imagining, strategizing, and planning for what you do.” Other signs of self sabotage include overextending yourself rather than focusing on a limited set of top priorities for moving forward. Chapter 2 concludes with a paragraph specifying a “final and most important lesson,” which is that “you learn to take action before you feel like doing it. Taking action builds momentum and creates motivation. These feelings will not come to you spontaneously; you have to generate them. You have to inspire yourself, you have to move.”
The title of Chapter 3, “Your Triggers Are the Guides to Your Freedom,” refers to what we think of as “negative emotions” which can actually be assets on our journey to self-mastery. Anger can be used to “help us make big, important changes both for ourselves and the world around us.” Regret can motivate us to do now what we regret having failed to do in the past (for example, showing someone that you love them before it’s too late). Resentment “seems to want to tell us what other people should change. However, other people are under no obligation to live up to our ideas of them. In fact, our only problem is that we have an unrealistic expectation that someone was meant to be exactly as we think they should or love us exactly as we imagined they would.” Chronic fear is another aspect of self-sabotage, and to “get over” our fear (of getting cancer, growing old, whatever) Wiest advises getting through it: “...we can learn to simply shrug and say, ‘and if that happens, it happens.’ The second we are able to shrug, laugh, or even just throw up our hands and say, ‘whatever, it will be fine,’ we instantly take back all of our power.” Instinct is a monitoring system that guides us moment-to-moment toward self-mastery, “quickly moving us out of harm’s way without having to think about it,” or mobilising our empathy in response to a friend’s need. Wiest distinguishes between intuitive thoughts and intruding (or invasive) thoughts: “Intuitive thoughts come to you once, maybe twice, and they induce a feeling of understanding. Intruding thoughts tend to be persistent and induce a feeling of panic” and “Intuitive thoughts solve problems; invasive thoughts create them,” and “Intuitive thoughts help you help others; invasive thoughts tend to create a ‘me vs. them’ mentality.”
Chapter 4, “Building Emotional Intelligence,” emphasises the importance of setting out to explore something new, as uncomfortable as that might be, because the human mind grows stronger and more creative with challenge and adversity. (It is antifragile.) A perpetual personal groundhog day is not what makes for a positive life experience. And yet it is important to remember that “...any change, no matter how positive, is uncomfortable until it is also familiar.” Accordingly, she continues, “You don’t change in breakthroughs; you change in microshifts….Breakthroughs are what happens after hours, days, and years of…mundane, monotonous work.” Every day counts. “What you do every single day accounts for the quality of your life and the degree of your success. It’s not whether you ‘feel’ like putting in the work, but whether or not you do it regardless.” Your life is your chance to change the world forever. “Part of the human narrative is wanting something to overcome. The trick is keeping it in balance, choosing to exit your comfort zone and endure pain for a worthy cause. Focusing on problems that are real problems in the world, like hunger or politics or whatever else.” In order to undertake something that you’re afraid of, she suggests you first think of things you do that would be daunting to a lot of other people. We don’t have irrational fear about things we are familiar with. We have irrational fear about things we are not (yet) familiar with. Thus “exposure is the most common treatment for irrational fear.” It turns out again and again that we can handle it. So “mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.”
In Chapter 5, “Releasing the Past,” the author begins with this: “Throughout the course of our lives, we will routinely go through a process of self-reinvention.” If the body replaces all its cells and is made “new” every seven years (so we are told), the mind does this much more often. And whereas the body does OK if it returns to baseline, that is not good enough for the self-reinvention of the mind. The way to “let go” is by placing those “good old days” with something that is new and inspiring: “You can only move on if you start building something new. You let go when you build a new life so immersive and engaging and exciting, you slowly, over time, forget about the past.” If you are wise, you will look back at the “good old days” and recognize that as good as they were, you would not want to relinquish the possibilities of the future and return to the past. What’s exciting now is that once you get unstuck, you are free to design the next phase of your growth. You begin to imagine the countless possibilities. “This is about you becoming who you know you can be. This is about you finally living up to your potential
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