“Pain is real, but suffering is optional”, said the Buddha.  3/03/2018

 I’m just starting to understand that quote.

Jordon Peterson, a renowned psychologist from Canada, states that writing is a sophisticated form of deep thinking.  He has an in depth self authoring help project for people to write about their lives in great detail from the age of a toddler up to enable people, especially young people to sort out their lives and be able to move on to happier, successful careers.  As a child things just are and children sort of live in the present from day to day.  Sometimes bad things happen and we see bad things but we don’t know how to sort things out and we don’t dwell on them or process them.  They stay unprocessed and distort our reality from then on.  Mr. Peterson says the brain how to come to terms with things that happened, it has to digest them. If not all our future experiences get distorted by our perception of what happened in the past.  So, all the writing and serious contemplating you do with his program from a toddler and through adult allows you to digest and come to terms with old experiences and to see your current life through a clearer lens.  My son who is 25 wanted to do his program, so I agreed to do it also even though I’m way past a career at age 64.  But I still had plenty of emotional garbage to sort out.

Something happens when you get to a point that you have time to look back and process your life.  As an older woman whose children have grown and now has lost her sex appeal, it’s like losing your identity.  I was never model quality but I was fairly attractive, had a good body and always felt sexually attractive to men.  That gave me a certain identity and also options for my life (to meet the right man, to get promoted at a job, etc.).  Now all that’s gone away and there’s the disappointment, not of what I did or accomplished, but what I didn’t and maybe should have done.  Interests I also realized late in life that I’ll never get the opportunity to do fully experience.

As a young woman there were so many things to decide and choose.  Life was new and hopeful.  What career I would have?  Would I go to college?  Where would I live?  Also, finding the man and having the family.  So I spent my twenties moving around a lot, having various jobs, various relationships and I did finish college.  The thirties and forties were spent being married, raising a family, running a business and a household.  Those years weren’t easy, there was just so much to do and not a lot of time for me or my problems. I had to get up every day and get moving and do all the things I had to do.  I did find some time for talk therapy trying to cope with all those difficulties during those years.  It did offer me some support, venting and coping, but I can’t say it changed me a lot, if at all. 

Around age 45 I finally had a little more free time to start thinking about me and getting involved in the world again.  I fell in love with belly dance and have been dancing for about twenty years now.  At about age 55, I also got back into music (I’ld learned piano as a teenager), this time learning guitar and writing songs.  I took voice lessons and guitar lessons, joined a local songwriting group and immersed myself in the things I wanted to learn.  As much as I enjoyed my new interests, I also experienced a fair amount of frustrations, disappointment and offenses.

Being a high achiever, I expected the new things I wanted to learn to come easy and many times it didn’t. 

I did have the past experience of learning painting as an artist and I did remember how difficult that was in the beginning.  I didn’t like any of my paintings or drawings for about five years, so having that perspective helped me be patient with learning new creative things.  With my songwriting and music I now tell myself, it’s going to be about ten years and I am into year six right now.  Being older, It’s also much harder to remember things and technique, it’s like your hard drive is filled up from a life time of thinking and learning.  Not impossible but harder.

Many teachers are used to teaching young people, so an adult learner is more of a challenge.  We’ve developed bad habits, can’t remember as well, are more demanding, etc. so this presents it’s own problems to a teacher.  We also know bits and pieces of things, but not the whole picture, so some things will be boring and others challenging.  A teacher just can’t start you out playing Mary Had a Little Lamb, but maybe that’s where you need to be.  Usually, I had to try several teachers in dance, voice and guitar until I found one who was fairly flexible and very patient.  Unfortunately, this all took time and resulted in some unpleasant incidents that weren’t handled well. But bottom line it was my money and free time and I was not going to suffer indignities. 

So this blog ties back to my successful weight loss in the previous article “Healthy Makes You a Better Creator – Part I”.  Recently I was slammed at work, under a lot of stress, was constantly being upset, annoyed and angry.  I started back to my bad coping habits of eating sweets and drinking some alcohol to calm down.  I had to admit my coping mechanisms were just temporarily helping.  I would think I felt better just for a few minutes, but then at night, I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t relax.  I was also starting to pack on some weight again after all my hard work for the previous six months.  I had to put the brakes on.  I had to come up with a new strategy.  I had to deal with my negative emotions.  I couldn’t believe I was almost age 65 and I could not control my emotions. I was mentally suffering.

 

Somehow I came across a blog called nperov.com about self-development and it was a godsend.  I knew what I had to do.  I had to get control of my negative emotions.  I wanted to be happy.  I wanted peace in my life more than anything else.  The guy who wrote the blog is Russian and it’s his own experience as he worked through his mental and emotional issues.  Not an overnight quick fix, but a roadmap for a journey to do the internal mental work needed.  As with the diet not everything applied to me so I’ve done some modifications and started on this journey to keep the gains I’ve already made.