Live YOUR Journey Part I: Avoiding Other People's Journeys

Welcome everyone to this podcast episode. I'm so glad you're here on this journey with me as I learn and grow and share the things I currently understand, things that change and refine and expand as time goes on. I've been thinking a lot about a phrase that came to mind a few months ago. I've wanted to write about it for a while now and haven't, so I'm taking advantage of this new palette to actually dive into it. In fact, as I've really pondered it, I think there are three different podcasts in here, so we'll make this a short series. We'll call this series Live your Journey. Emphasis on your.

This first episode of the series is going to focus on one way that we avoid living our own journeys. Now, to quickly set the stage, you have your own unique journey that you are on right now. No one in the world has had your journey from the beginning of time to the end of time, meaning that no one can live your journey but you. However, as human beings, there are some natural tendencies that come up and that can ultimately distract us from living the journey that we're on, and it's those natural tendencies that I want to talk about for the next few episodes. So today I want to start by sharing a story from one of my mentors in my yoga therapy program. My mentor told the story a few different times in a few different contexts, but for some reason one day it really struck me. She spoke about how, when she was younger, her mother received a breast cancer diagnosis and this diagnosis and the subsequent treatment had a huge effect on her family and her personally, causing a lot of fear. And she noticed as she got older that she was keenly aware of any possible indication that she might also have breast cancer, the impact that it might have on her own family and on her kids, and it caused a great deal of stress in her life. And that stress impacted her relationships and impacted her choices and impacted her happiness. And then one day something really important occurred to her she didn't have breast cancer, as she told it. She paused and said wait a minute, I don't have breast cancer. It was such a simple revelation, but it was so crucial to her. She was not her mom, she did not have breast cancer. It wasn't her story. In fact, as she began to move through the process of going with these emotions and this experience, that kind of became a mantra for her that's not my story, and she got really clear about what was her story and what wasn't her story. When I heard this for perhaps the third time, it struck me that what she was saying was that breast cancer was not part of her journey. Right here and right now she was living her life and making choices in an attempt to avoid living her mother's journey. But her mother's journey wasn't her journey. She had her own journey, and at least for now, that didn't include breast cancer.

And then I started to realize how often we as humans, out of fear, more often than not, make choices that we think will allow us to avoid the journeys that we've seen others go through, the painful experiences that we see others have that frighten us, that we don't think we could handle. So perhaps our parents got divorced, so we live our life trying to avoid divorce. Or our dad lost his job when we were little and that made things really hard, so we live a life trying to avoid losing a job. Or our neighbor's kid is being bullied at school, so we try to live a life that avoids our kids being bullied. And all of this sounds perfectly reasonable on the surface. Of course we don't want to suffer. We don't want anyone that we love to suffer and, to be clear, I am not advocating pursuing suffering in any way, because we will have plenty of it on our own without even trying.

The deeper problem of living our lives this way is that we're living our lives based on basically two premises First, that those things are going to be part of our journey unless we do something about it and second, that we could do something about it to avoid it if it were part of our journey. So let's tackle both of these premises to see why they're problematic. First, unless something was already a part of our journey or is currently a part of our journey, we really have no idea whether or not it will be in the future. Again, this is with one or two exceptions. Death and taxes come to mind.

While there are clearly people who deal with illness, diagnoses, job loss, divorce, bullying, etc. There are also a lot of people who don't. There are plenty of families where one member had cancer but others didn't. Plenty of families where dad never lost a job. Plenty of families where divorce doesn't happen. Plenty of kids who aren't bullied at school. Do we know why those things do or don't happen Rarely, even when we think we know there are always factors in play that we don't see or we don't understand. So the danger comes when we live our lives trying to avoid a circumstance because it scares us that might happen in the future, instead of living the journey. That is right here, right now, because that means, if we're focusing on avoiding those things, there are learning opportunities, there are chances to heal and let go, there are ways that we can help others that are going unheeded because we're focused on someone else's journey.

Now to the second point. Sometimes we get it in our minds that if we just do the right things and the word right is most definitely in quotes that somehow we can avoid difficult situations in our lives. And this is not to say that our choices don't have an impact on our journeys. Of course they do. But when it comes to making choices in order to avoid difficulty or heartache, there are very few guarantees. As always, there are some things that we can directly connect between action and outcome. If I never drink alcohol, I will never become an alcoholic. If I never engage in a potentially addictive behavior, I will never become addicted to that behavior. There are some direct cause and effect relationships in this world, but there are so many more that are not. Some people who drink alcohol don't become alcoholics. Some people who go out without sunscreen don't get skin cancer. Some people engage in risky behavior for years without experiencing a direct consequence. I know people and you probably do too who lived healthy lifestyles but developed cancer. I know people who worked hard and did their jobs every day but still got laid off. I know people and I saw them as a teacher who did nothing to provoke it but were still bullied.

Sometimes, it doesn't matter what we do, experiences come into our lives. Now it's important to remember as we talk about this that, while some aspects of journeys do seem to be divinely directed, many of our experiences come because we are human beings living in number one, a physical world, and number two, a world where people get to make choices, and whether through our choices or the choices of others, or through the complexities of living in the bodies and the world that we do, experiences come that aren't actually punishments or statements of our worthiness. The journey didn't cause it, it didn't make that circumstance happen. Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes we stub our toe or forget to make a payment or get in a car accident, just because that is life. The intelligence behind journeys doesn't have to make these things happen. The laws of the universe are already in play.

What the journey can do with these types of experiences is to take them and hold them and us in a way that sees us better on the other side, that helps us to find meaning in the midst of difficulty, that opens up our ability to have compassion and forgiveness, if we let it. But notice I didn't say meaning in this difficulty, because I think we can drive ourselves crazy trying to figure out what it is about this specific experience. What specific lesson am I supposed to learn from diabetes or struggling in school or a miscarriage? Again, those may be things that entered our experience that are not directed or targeted, and so often we won't understand the lessons around those experiences until much later. But learning to find meaning in difficulty, how do I handle things that are hard? What does my mind do when I feel overwhelmed or uncertain? How do I treat people when I'm stressed? How can I take better care of myself when I'm struggling? Those types of learnings and they're powerful and they can carry forward into future journeys. So let me put this on a personal level.

A close family member of mine received a breast cancer diagnosis a few years ago, and she handled it with courage, through the many changes and treatments and losses, and is, at the time of this recording, cancer-free. And it's easy for me to take that experience because she's family and become obsessed with trying to avoid her experience. So I started asking questions what was she doing when it happened? What lifestyle habits should I avoid? What did she eat that Monday? Et cetera, et cetera. Right In the end, though, none of that can even be tied directly to her cancer diagnosis. So doing those things may or may not have an impact.

At this moment I don't have cancer and even if I do end up with my own cancer diagnosis, it will be mine, not hers. My experience will not be her experience. My solutions may not be her solutions. So even if that does happen, I still can't live my life according to her diagnosis. What I can do is honor and respect the way that she handled her journey with cancer and hope to handle my own journeys, whatever they may entail, with openness.

That's really what we can do with the journeys of others not necessarily do or not do what they did or didn't do, but instead honor that. It's a journey. Honor the struggle, honor the ways that they engage with the difficulty. Those are the lessons that we can take into our journeys and I guess, in the end, what I'm hoping that we can all get out of this is it might be worth some time to pause and see if the things that we're doing in our life are a direct response to our journey or if we're looking at other people's journeys and allowing fear of those experiences to influence our lives so much that we stop living our own.

This journey that you are on matters. The journeys that other people are on matter, and the more I come to see and understand that they both matter equally in their own spheres, the more I can have compassion, the more I can find peace, the more I can appreciate not only my journey but the larger process that knows me, that knows them and can help us all in the ways that we need most. So I invite you to take some time to look at what you're doing, particularly those things that may feel urgent or fear based even though that's hard to accept sometimes and see if that is blocking your ability to live your journey and look at what the implications might be. What could you maybe consider doing differently. You can find a link to some journal prompts in the description of the episode if that appeals to you. This is your journey, our life is a journey and it's time to start living like it. Thanks for listening. See you next time.