Does taking on another’s belief really happen? Are some of our beliefs really given to us by others? If you are an average heterosexual male you may unwittingly contribute to a major heterosexual male fear belief: Homophobia.

An amazing number of Men in America are Homophobic. Some Men arrive at a high level paranoia. Men are terrified of being around a possibly gay man. Mortified if he is a ‘real’ Gay Man. Men are always publicly aware to not do or say anything that can vaguely be perceived as a Gay Man Behavior by people around them. Men are not always sure what those identifying behaviors are, so men stick to using a limited field of behaviors.

Typical male behavior in a public bathroom is a prime example. American Men’s behavior in public bathrooms is neither natural or sane. The younger the man, the more pronounced the scripted behavior is. Tunnel vision, no speaking to another man, exhibits of overly manly acts are typical examples. Straight Men are terrified another straight man will think they may secretly be gay by a misinterpreted public behavior.

In general Men talk, act, and perhaps think their sexual preference will be switched forever if they are in the close proximity of a Gay Man. Too many straight Men are terrified of talking to let alone being propositioned by a Gay Man. Though a man talking to or being propositioned by a Woman is a different matter.

Men waste a tremendous amount of energy holding onto this fear! Men’s public conversation generally revolves around sports, cars, the outdoors, and women. Conversation is generally about sports, preferably football. Football is huge testosterone territory. There is nothing effeminate in Football. Cars are talked about if they are fast or big. ‘Real’ Men hold these conversations to show the world they are straight. These are types of approved subjects for public conversations of ‘real men’.

Men's irrational fear

If you are a Man and discovered your Brother is gay, you dropped this unfounded homophobic behavior. Your Father gave it up due to his love for his son. Other male family members mostly drop this behavior too. Everyone involved is forced to acknowledge sexual preference has nothing to do with the person.

The American Military overturned keeping sexual preference a secret almost a year ago. Today the American Military is proof of concept in this matter. Openly Gay Men and Women are pulling their own weight, accepted by their units, achieving and excelling at the same rate as their straight counterparts. Their straight counterparts have learned that homophobia is irrational. They dropped this belief because it took too much attention and energy away from what is important for them in the moment, staying alive and safe.

It is hard to admit some of our beliefs we so strongly defend are nothing more than implanted beliefs from Adults of our childhood. Your favorite teacher, Aunt, or Uncle played a major part in what you think is important. Much of what we think or believe about people, animals, politics, and places is a result of these people. Our Parents and others around us told or showed us what is important.

When any thought or belief pops up and you know it is not held by reasonable people, let it go. Irrational beliefs use up a lot of energy as you try to hold on to them. Rationalizing and justifying ideas that can not be justified or rationalized means important parts of your present life are being neglected.

Situations where you suddenly realize you have an emotional stake in the outcome are sometimes not all that important if you slow down and think about them. Is it really you taking this stance or someone from your past?

You may not have had time to examine where your thoughts and beliefs came from and why you have them. You should take a little time each day and examine why you think and believe what you do. Serious belief examination allows our everyday life to be more enjoyable.

I bet you paused there with some sort of unsaid expletive. How could I possibly an expert on you? After all I do not know your name, where you live, or any other information about you, other than you are reading this post at the moment. I do not even know when that moment will be.

You are absolutely correct. I know nothing about you, except you are on my blog reading this post. Yet I can say I know everything about you because of the Pick Up Sticks children’s game. You, I, and everyone you know are who they are because we all picked sticks dropped by adults around us when we were children.

Here is a sixty second test you can take to see why this is idea is true. Think about a topic that really sets you on edge. Any topic, religion, politics, the Middle East, race, EU, starving children, gay rights and/or gay activists.

Who gave you your beliefs

You hold strong feelings on some subjects because you picked up a stick on this subject as a child. Someone gave you a stick which you picked up and made your own. If you did not pick that particular stick, the topic(s) which rile you would not be important at all.

Are you thinking that is not true? You know you have very good reasons for feeling the way you feel about your hot topics, namely you are right, and others are wrong! Where did those feelings come from? Who told these ideas to you? You were not born with these thoughts, they did not blossom in you from outer space. Somehow you were exposed to your hot topic, and it was reinforced often enough to develop strong feelings about it.

I have strong feelings about the save the children programs. Humanitarians enter underdeveloped countries and feed, cloth, and vaccinate children so they can grow into healthy adults. This topic irritates me on a number of different levels.

All we have done and are doing is entering a region that is supporting a larger human population that it can naturally, and creating a synthetic environment where even more people are living long enough to have even more children than their own generation. This means even more children living in garbage dumps, drinking sewer water, and “struggling to survive for another day in grinding poverty”.

I think my strong feelings about this topic started when I was a kid. I would be guilt-ed into eating all my food with the phrase, “You better eat all your food because of the starving Children in Africa”. Family members often repeated this phrase, either to myself or their own children, giving added weight to the original stick given to me by my own Mother.

Think deeply why you have strong opinions on certain topics. Think about where the stick you picked up came from. We are born pretty much a blank slate. We learn from whatever ever we are told. As children we are a sponge for every attitude and belief of our parents and other adults around us.

As adults we have very strong opinions about many subjects. Some beliefs we hold are so strong we are willing to to lose our life over them. Other beliefs we feel less strongly about. All our opinions and beliefs are not ours at all. All through our childhood we have been picking up other peoples sticks of opinion and belief.

If you uncover your feelings and beliefs trying to find justification for for them, you will wind up empty handed. Sexual orientation of people around you does not mean anything once you throw away the stick you hold that says it does.

Neither does skin color, race, or religious preference matter when you go back and find the first stick you picked up on these subjects that made it important. Your ethics and mores are arrived on a stick you picked up from an adult when you were little. Growing up in a different land, or environment, your ethics and mores may be completely different because the sticks you hold are different than mine.

It is true, I know all about you because I picked up many of the same sticks. You know all about me for the same reason. We both know all about other people too. No matter who we are, and what we believe, it all started when we unknowingly started picking up sticks dropped around us by adults in our life when we were children.

You now know all there is to know about picking up sticks. What happens now? Do you allow yourself to get angry without really knowing why something is important? Do you decide this post is a waste of your time? Do you decide I am not thinking correctly?

Better for all of us, are you going to start examining all the sticks you have collected over your lifetime? Are you going to look at them impartially, maybe for the first time? Which sticks are worth keeping and defending, and which sticks are pure poison? Do you pick up this stick that I have offered, or is it too scary to touch?

I know I catch myself doing this at times, usually when there could be an encounter with another person which I would rather avoid, like a panhandler for example. Unfortunately we go overboard with this behavior because we are often driven by how we plan our life.

So we spend our day flitting around from place to place, meeting to meeting, appointment to appointment. At the end of the day we wonder what what we did all day. We know we were busy, yet the day was such a blur, we are not sure what we did exactly. Trying to pull the enjoyment out of day when we are like this is harder.

Some days, at the end of a particularly busy day, we get home, start to relax, and wonder why we do it. Why do we race through our day, and end the day with little or no personal satisfaction for our effort? What is the point of it all? If it sound familiar, it is because many of us feel we live hollow, unfulfilled lives.

What if we had ten or more lifetimes ahead of us from this moment? How would we spend our days knowing there is no need to rush? What would be the purpose of hurrying from point to point through the day, when it would matter little in the long run whether we were two minutes early or two minutes late. Would we change the way we manage our lives?

With a little schedule shifting and changing of how we manage our life, we can do just that. We can change the way we manage our life to where a few minutes here or a few minutes there really are of little importance. Think about how much pressure and stress could be removed from each and every day! We could feel relaxed knowing a few extra minutes several times a day were not that important over our lifetime?

It can be done if we really want to do it. All it takes is a little planning and wanting to change how we manage our life and our time. After all we do have forever. We have forever because we can not imagine the finite in our lifetime. No one pays any attention to wasting a few minutes when they have nothing to do, because looking ahead in our life, the minutes stretch on beyond any point we can quantify them.

If you want to use your lifetime as if you are living forever instead of feeling harried and rushed at the end of each day, here are a few easy ways to start. Once you have the basics down, you can modify your life plan as you wish to make each day of your life exactly what you want for yourself.

Unless we are forced into a different choice, we are creatures of habit. We have some moments in our day which can not be altered and we feel rushed. We have to be somewhere for something at an exact time. Not only would it be rude to be late, but it may be a detriment to our overall well being. We would not want to do anything to make our life more difficult than it has to be. That would be going against the idea of making life simpler.

Most people think of the morning when they start their day as the beginning. This is the first thought that has to change. The next day starts with the time you go to bed the night before. Because you have all the time in the world, there is no need to go without enough sleep trying to do something that is not really all that important. By going to bed early enough that when the alarm goes off you are ready to get up and start he day, you are on your way to having more time in your day. This is why the night before is when you really start your next day.

When the alarm goes how much time do you have before you start feeling rushed? If you only give yourself ten minutes between the alarm going off and getting out the door, you may want to think about the rest of your day. You have all the time you need. Why put off getting up until the last minute? It does not make you feel good, you feel busy and you are barely awake! Adjust your schedule to go to sleep earlier, so you can get up earlier and enjoy having more time to leisurely start your day.

Give yourself an extra ten minutes or so from the time you leave your home to where you are going. The travel time is not wasted time, and you do not want to make it a high stress time. Plan this first event after leaving your house to be as stress free as possible, not scurrying along becoming frustrated because you are being delayed. If this happens, you are not being delayed, you left to late because you did not give yourself enough time, and you have all the time you need.

Some people feel a need to stay up to a certain time. Why? If it is television, record it and watch it tomorrow. If it is something else, can it be moved to an earlier time so it does not effect your sleep time? If it can not be moved, is it really that important, or is it a time filler that has become an inconvenience?

Give yourself extra empty time as you go through the rest of your day. There are moments in every day when time is limited, and these are out of our control. Most of the day however, we can plan out at an enjoyable pace. If we do not get it done today, we can do it tomorrow, we now have all the time we need.

If letting go were a simple process, we would never remember a skinned knee, smashed finger, or sore body part. If we hurt ourselves, we would pause, perform some simple ritual, and everything would be better. Fortunately for us, not letting go is a survival technique inherent in all of us.

What we do instead when we, Let Go, is we assimilate this present pain into us. We make it a part of us. We absorb it into ourselves. We take this pain inside of us and we mix it in with all our memories. We mingle and rationalize our present pain and emotion until we begin to feel a lessening of our pain.

We can go to others for help, though they can not really help us in the normal way we think of helping. We each have all the help we need inside us. What we need to do is decide we are ready to move on. At this moment when we decide to move on, our situation and our pain starts to change.

Generally whatever happened is the absolute worst thing we have ever experienced and it comes with the most pain we have ever experienced. Eventually we know we have to make a decision about our misery. Either we spend the rest of our life living in the moment of the pain, or we decide to start living our life again.

If we decide to start living our life again, we can see the pain for what it really is. The emotional pain we feel is a part of our life. Our pain is the result of our personal life experience. Our pain has happened and nothing we can do will ever make it disappear.

What we can do is stop thinking about hoe we feel, and start thinking about the events that led up to why we feel this way. What happened that was in our control and what happened that was beyond our control.

Whatever was in our control, we can ensure we do not do a repeat. By doing a repeat, I do not mean stop dating because this time it hurt so bad. Rather, slow down and think about what happened before. Were their signals the other person was giving off we chose to ignore? Did we emotionally invest more than we should have? Did we choose not to see the situation for what it was, and chose to create our own version instead?

It may well be there was nothing that could have been changed. It happens, and it is painful. It is also a part of life, and we can not quit living because we are hurt. Everyone of us is vulnerable because we are living our life the best we know how. Most pain of this type is a one time occurrence. It happened and it will never happen again.

If these situations are repeatable in our life, there is something we need to learn from them we are choosing to ignore. If you have one painful experience after another, perhaps it is time to change directions and not go down that path yet again. Going down a new path can be no worse than going down the same path  again. If this pain is a onetime experience, accept it for what it is. Learn from it, and keep on living.

Letting Go is an opportunity for Health and Healing. Disparate and elaborate methods have been developed of hopefully fixing not being able to let go. Of course as with any perceived need there are almost as many people willing to help – for a price.

Read any Self Improvement Forum, or Personal Blogs, and invariably someone wants help to let go of something they feel is controlling their life. Go figure! That is what struck me as so funny today while I was doing some reading today,

People share their pain in a public forum looking for relief. They are desperate, looking for a way to move past some emotional event that has taken over their life. These people feel so helpless they are asking the world to help them with their pain.

What I found funny today were the words: Letting Go! Letting Go, as if letting go is some physical entity attaching itself to someone who was unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Letting go attached itself to them and now they can not get rid of it.

Someone was in a relationship that went sour. A best friend left for no reason, a family or friend died, a close friend was unforgivably rude, or committed some other act that caused the other person to be so taken out of their life they can no longer find their way back.

We are all vulnerable painful experiences. Most of us come to terms with them and move past their infection point in our lives. Others though are in deeper pain. They feel like they are the only person in the world to experience the emotions they are feeling.

After a number of seconds when you feel you can repeat your phrase and do something else at the same time, keep your phrase going and start listening to your breathing. Your breathing will not sound smooth and rhythmic at first, and this is the second thing you do while listening to your phrase, you smooth out and relax your breathing.

As you have your phrase going in the background and your breathing in the foreground slowly start listening for other voices repeating your phrase. This is a the third audible event you will do. Listen for other voices repeating at the same cadence you are in the background. It may sound funny to you, but voices will be there if you listen closely. Be aware of other separate and distinct voices repeating the same syllables you are.

You may hear many different voices, from both sexes, and all ages. These voices are helping you and are natural. Let the voices take over for you. Hear the voices repeat your phrase behind the sound of your breathing. The phrase is there in the background and there is no longer any need to pay attention to it.

You may start to see a visual pattern or possibly scenes. Your vision a movie screen – this is important, do not attempt to look around. Looking around or focusing on what you see may wake you. You are simply a casual observer. Let whatever you see flow across your personal movie screen without trying to interact with it. Look at what you see without thinking about it.

For me, repeating nonsense words starting with ‘B ‘, I will start to see shapes like individual honeycomb cells flowing outward from the center of my vision. Sometimes the shapes are solid and other times they are only wavering lines. They usually look like they are projected onto a screen from a movie projector.

If nothing happens to wake me, they go away to be replaced by other scenes. Some of them make sense, and some do not. I let them flow and change as they will. Once in a while there is a someone there talking to me. I listen without taking part in the conversation.

If you are successful to this point, and you have visual, and auditory going on, you have arrived! The surest way I know it is occurring is I feel like I am partially out of my body. If I am sitting, I feel like am halfway to standing. If that feeling happens do not think about it. You are only observing.

It may not feel like it, but if you experience the above you are in a meditative state! For me, the auditory phrases drop off, and as I mentioned the visual changes from moving shapes to scenes or appearances.  I let them flow and try not to interact with them or make sense of them. It is important to remain an observer.

Try not to focus on what is happening. Let yourself be an observer rather than a participant. If you are being spoken to, hear the words without hearing them. Simply let them flow through your hearing. If you are seeing images, do not contemplate what you are seeing, look without trying to make sense of what you see.

This hardest part of meditation is learning how to meditate. If you are familiar with the idea of Lucid Dreams, it is almost the same feeling. In a Lucid Dream you know you are sleeping but you also are aware of what is going on around you. With practice you learn to control what is going on.

It is almost the same with meditation, though you first want to achieve the state before you try to control the action. If you become impatient and start paying attention, or controlling what is going on you are back to where you started.

One final thought, though you can find hundreds of pictures of people in meditation poses. For now, leave the posing to them. What you need is somewhere where you are comfortable and not standing. Beyond that it is all what makes you the most comfortable as pertains to light, sounds, surface, and clothing.

Everyone has been asked and also asked someone else, “Hello, are you there? I am, talking to you.” We are not paying attention, checked out, or are daydreaming. Different words to describe the same state. You are talking to someone and you realize that they are not paying the slightest bit of attention to you. They are sitting right by you, but you can tell by looking at them, they are miles and miles away.

If you have been trying to meditate and feel you cannot, remember times when you were the person who left the conversation and went somewhere else. What were you thinking about when it happened? When was the last time it happened? Was it quiet, noisy, busy, or still? Whatever triggered your leaving the conversation can be used to help you learn to meditate.

We all are different and we all have different ways of interacting with the world. For successful meditation, what works for one person, or several people may be totally wrong for you. Just because one famous person does something and it works for them, does not mean it will work for you. You may need a different setting, less, or more stimulation. Maybe you need music, running water, bird sounds, or kids at play in the distance. Maybe you need a dark room with complete silence. All of these settings trigger different reactions in different people.

This is what I do when meditation does not happen smoothly. Perhaps it will help you find a sequence to help you learn to meditate? I flood my mind with differing type’s of quiet directed stimuli. There is usually so much noise in our minds we are not aware of it though it needs to be quieted for meditation to happen.

First I decide on a combination of sound. I prefer a three syllable nonsense word that ends with a vibration syllable such as, eng, ing, om, or ong. The nonsense word, Beir-har-ing as an example word. Any three or more syllable word should be as effective as well as any other three syllable combination. If a syllable combination pops into your thoughts while you are getting ready to try meditation, use it instead.

Different combinations of syllables have different effects for me. I have noticed for example that nonsense words starting with a B produces red or orange images in my mind. Starting syllables such as, ‘bear, behr, beer’, all produce a slightly different effect on me in a way not related to the meaning of the sound.

The idea of stimuli appears to go against the norm, and that is ok. You want to achieve a meditative state, not ponder your life. This may be a modified form of EFT used for a different purpose. EFT attempts to engage all your senses and keep your mind busy while a unique thought is introduced in the background.

Learning how to quiet your mind for more than a few seconds is a job in itself, so why not try to use a busy mind to your advantage? Why not use a simple handy aid to make the process more productive and less frustrating? If you sit quietly and listen you will notice a steady stream of thought, sometimes verbal, sometimes not. It takes time to learn how to silence it, and is a big frustrater to meditating. Let’s try something I know works for me, starting with the next post.

Once the basic three needs were solved, who knows long ago, regular amounts of food, shelter, and offspring, we started to have have time to ponder other life mysteries. The search for, The Fountain of Youth, goes on yet today, as does the quest for ruling the world, the secret to creating and sustaining life, and the search for our own personal truth(s). Searching for our own personal truth, whether it be religion, lack of religion, or fairies in the hedge row, we all are on the same search, hoping to give meaning to our life.

Michael Ayers has been on a quest for his personal truth for some time now. Michael’s blog has a dedicated following who have stood along side of Michael at various times and topographies, as Michael set off to pursue his own personal truth looking for answers to the question of his own reason for being alive.

You will have to read Michael’s blog yourself to find what Michael has found to be true for him. Michael searched and suffered, hitting deep lows and reaching new heights, only to be plunged into new lows, a repeating cycle of ups and downs. Perhaps Michael’s search is not over yet. Maybe Michael has only reached a higher plateau, and is unknown to himself resting and regrouping, before his insatiable curiosity spurs him onward to find more.

My own quest for what is true for me took decades. I tried to fit everything I knew to be true into a hand me down mold. What I believed to be true was always at odds with my inherited package of what was supposedly true. It was not until I accepted almost everything I was told to believe was not quite true, and my flighty willingness to accept what I knew rather than what I had been told, that I started to believe my own truths.

I am curious if you are your own quest for your own personal truths? Does the version of truth you were given by your family meet your needs, or is there a little niggling voice coming out of the background of your mind every now and then suggesting what you think you believe is not quite true?

If you have heard the voice, have you done anything about it? The first steps as Michael can attest to are the easiest. It is once you are well down the path when the cobble stones beneath your feet start to crumble, and the way becomes slippery, frustrating, and difficult. During these times a second voice is heard. Every explorer and risk taker who stepped out from the herd knows this voice. It is a voice of steeling.

You rarely hear the second voice when the sun is shining and you are sure of the route. You know the truth you are seeking is just around the corner, you can almost see it if you strain your eyes the right way and bend your neck in the correct position. Our final truth is only a short way up the path, we are almost there.

Maybe we become too needy in this moment. We are worn and haggard, and we want to find what we are looking for and be done with it. We are tired from our journey. The quest that seemed so romantic, simple, and fun in the beginning is taking more time and energy than we bargained for.

As the sun sets, and we are tired we hear a new voice, “Maybe we made a mistake? Maybe there is no truth to find? Maybe what we were told is the only truth we need to believe?” The same question formulated into a hundred different doubts makes its presence known. Maybe we should quit it say’s

Putty or steel, what are we made of? To give up the search because it is not fun and is becoming painful, or move one foot in front of the other to the end? Fall back into the fold and safety of the herd, accept their murmurs of welcome, or continue on?

Moving on means more of the same, deprivation, restlessness, loneliness, and doubt become our companions if we choose to continue. It is not an easy choice, and there may not be a correct answer. It is a test of your spirit, and everything you are made of. If you are like Michael and others like him, you too may find what you are looking for.

In this instance my initial Rule of Three failed me in trying to choose a Recumbent Trike. I was wavering between four models and two companies. I thought the decision would be easy as I decided what my top three needs were in a Recumbent Trike. They were:

1. Quality Build – If I am spending what is to me a large amount of money, I want to most quality product my allotted dollars can buy. This decision was made more complex by the pricing structure, and ignorance of bicycle components. Both companies and all models seemed to have almost equal yet different makers and level of the installed components.

2. Crowd favorite – As I have little Experience with Recumbent Trikes, it was important to stick to a manufacturer and model which other have bought and are or were happy with before they decided they needed something more.

3. General comfort and high speed safety – I love to go fast. I also want to be comfortable. Unfortunately, comfort and speed do not meld together well in a human powered vehicle.

In situations such as these where there is no clear choice when the most important factors are used, a new model needs to be created to do a better job of showing differences between what appear to be almost identical choices. I have heard this called, “Keep investigating until one of your choices reaches out and grabs you”.

That is a good explanation, and it works. Make a snap decision, and any of my four choices may indeed have been good. I may have been happy with any one of the four choices I narrowed my search down to. And maybe not too.

The problem is it is an important decision. I need to be happy with the result long term and be comfortable knowing I made the right decision. Because there were four Recumbent Trikes in my list, and they all seemed equal, I had to find areas where one choice clearly outweighed my other three choices .

My choice needed to be solid enough so I do not suffer that little nagging voice in the background telling me, maybe I would ‘really’ be happier with one of the other Recumbent Trikes other than the one I chose because I could not choose correctly.

When that little voice starts, it is hard to quiet it. It is a subtle little thought that appears whenever something is not quite perfect with a choice I made. It whispers, “…maybe the other choice would have been better?” Of course there is no way of knowing either way, and the doubt lingers and grows over time.

What I did first was ignore what was written by people who were obviously in love with their Recumbent Trikes, and read comments from people who had quibbles with their purchase. What did these people mostly agree on that was good for each Recumbent Trike though they chose a different brand or model?

Secondly, I placed a formal weight on each of my choices. I started with 100 point pie and split it into three, giving each slice thirty-three points. That did not help much, but it led to a different set of criteria. I needed to rethink and redetermine how much each of my choices really mattered when added together to equal one-hundred.

High speed, though fun, is not really crucial to my enjoyment of peddling around as it is once in while event. What the crowds prefer did not help either because everyone has different needs and wants. Neither did comfort, because for every complaint in the comfort department there is someone else who was thrilled, or there is a fix in place.

My final list boiled down to with about thirty points for each item was:

• Quality of Manufacture and Components.
• Provable value for each dollar spent.
• Technical experience of posters on various Trike forums.

Quality was number one. The car commercial is correct, Quality is Job One. Quality was given the biggest slice of my 100 point pie.  Value for each dollar spent changed my thinking on how much I should spend. That was the second biggest piece of my one-hundred pie. Third was expertise and experience of Trike riding posters in the forums. People who had years of cycling experience and were now riding a Recumbent Trike, enjoying it, and having knowledge and experience to back up their opinions.

After re-slicing my 100 point pie, everything became simple. I was still using The Rule of Three, but now they were three criteria that showed the strong points and flaws in each of my previously ‘about the same’ four picks. Especially when I had the opinions of cycling experts available to weigh my guesses against.

Basing my decisions of these three weighted wants, it was a simple matter to make the most correct choice. Revising and weighing my wants against each of the four Trike models I narrowed my view. The best choice stood out easily over the other three. I went to sleep feeling I had arrived at a good decision, and woke the next morning, knowing I arrived at the best decision for me.

This was good learning! The learning in this post, is if you follow a sound decision making process, and all decisions appear to be equal, take a few moments and redefine the criteria you are using to arrive at a decision. When you are objective and use the correct criteria instead of what you think is the correct criteria, the right choice is a no-brainer. It will, “reach out and grab you!”

Whether you peruse Supermarket Rags, follow Celebrity gossip on television or internet, or pay attention to what is happening within your circle of friends and acquaintances, there is always one underlying theme. Ms. Christina Aguilera made the cover of a Supermarket Magazine recently. Other celebrities made the front pages of other magazines, and still more celebrities are making the gossip pages on the internet. In your world and mine, we know someone who is suffering the same fate, or is about to. The shock of finding your friends life dissolving is not restricted to somebody the media can exploit to make a few nickels.

What these people who’s life has fallen apart for no obvious reason share is feeling distanced and cut off from the rest of the world. Try as they may, what they have been doing all these years, no longer works. Pretending everything is fine, or burying themselves in something exterior to dull the pain, does not help the pain of isolation and surging feelings of loneliness. Temporary relief for some people it is food, for others, some other form of personal abuse. For any who have been in this situation, we feel like we are standing with toes over the edge of a bottomless pit, and we have not quite made the decision to jump yet.

In America (at least) we are conditioned to treat everything with a physical response. If it hurts, there is a pill for it. If we are lonely there is someone waiting for us. We use in excess food, alcohol or drugs, and other forms of self abuse. When our cure does not work, we try harder and at times add something else to the mix. A famous singer from the sixties is an example, food, alcohol and drugs, and none of them helped in the end.

There is also an internal perception problem. Our perception is the world has cut us off. No matter what we do we can not connect in any meaningful way. We try different ways of trying to connect. We join to groups we never really become a part of. We try sports, religion, or attachments. We search Boyfriends or Girlfriends who will be sympathetic to how we feel. No matter how they try, they can not make us feel complete. That emptiness is always hovering in the background, just out of site.

I made a post, The Dark Night of the Soul which captured some of what I learned from the process. To put everything in a cookie cutter mode, if you feel this way, the world has not shunned you, you have shunned the world. If you find that offensive, it is because there is truth to be found there. Life to be lived properly is lived through the heart. Life lived any other way is an empty shell of a life.

Two real choices exist when this state is realized. Go on living the same way, knowing nothing will change. Or decide that life in such a state is not worth living, and make the decision to change your life no matter how painful change may be. The quickest way to change, and that does not really relate to quick as in a timeline, is to acknowledge that everything you believe to be true about yourself and the world is most likely incorrect.

Beliefs encompassing physical and spiritual domains, yourself, and your reality is most likely faulty. Of course there is always the other option and that is the idea that live will start improving any day now, even though life has only become more difficult over the last years.

The bright side to finding ones self in this situation is the knowledge that if it has not happened already, hitting rock bottom is a certainty and not too far away. At that moment the choices become very clear. Either continue to exist in a life one would not wish on their worst enemy, or make the decision to let go of everything one thinks is true and start over. Starting over, is by far the more pleasant of the two choices though it comes with some amount of pain before any gain is realized.