Why in the hell did I do it? Take off alone on an adventure at sea? What got me to that point?
What gets you to that point?
Have you ever been so humiliated that it just utterly devastated you? Well, it did me and I wouldn't talk about it for years.
I've been called brave. I've been called courageous, and there are some aspects of that that I'll own...I stuck it out through a storm at sea. I could have gotten saved from the Coast Guard angels when they came to visit me, but I didn't. I chose to keep going for reasons I didn't understand at the time.
But the real reason is: I was a coward. Why was I a coward?
This is the second in a series of at least eight videos under the title, "Run Toward That Which Scares You."
I was in a relationship at the time, or so I thought. It was kind of complicated...one of those. Can you relate? It crushed me and I take full responsibility for my own emotional responses. My ego took over immediately with my human voice speaking loudly to all I would see with phrases like...
"I don't care! F*** her! Whatever. I'm going to go off on this adventure."
So, I took off on an adventure into the unknown, doing the scariest thing possible that I could think of at the time. It's kind of a pattern with me, and it might be a pattern with you.
That was back in 2010. In 2003, I was fired from my profession. I spent six years of my life going to architecture school at Carnegie Mellon University. Graduated at the top of my class, or one of the tops of my class...anyway, I had an honors cord. Upon going out there as an Architect, I began to hate it. I own that now, but I didn't back then. I was taking my anger out on my family. I was taking it out on the people that I worked with. I was taking it out on the few friends that I had because I was a jerk.
One day they called me into the office...
"Dude, your attitude sucks. You do good work, but you're an asshole. So you're fired." Boom. See ya.
Humiliation, but was I going to admit to it? Hell no. I was going to bury that crap down because "I'm a tough guy." "I'm a male, blah, blah, blah..."
Humiliation is a trigger. That last one, that relationship that went south? I didn't know how to deal with it. I wouldn't deal with it. Thus, the cowardliness in me. Instead of facing it head on and admitting it, what do I do? I ran. I ran into the absolute scariest thing I could possibly think of at the time in order for my ego to prove something.
Humiliation happens. Anger happens. All these different emotions happen, and they're fine. We're supposed to go feel them.
Through the whole process, especially while alone at sea, what I learned was this:
Pushing feelings down...pushing hurt down...burying it and acting like a tough guy while putting on that facade of, "I'm okay. I'm fine. I've got to let it go."
No. Don't let it go. Let it out. There is a difference.
Letting go is releasing through a process, not burying out of frustration and denial. Let it rise to the surface. Deal with it. Own it. Meditate about it. Talk to people about it.
If you do talk to somebody about it and they say, "I don't want to hear that crap. Just let it go, man." That's not the kind of person that you want to talk with.
The kind of person that you want to talk with is like-minded and feels the same emotion you do, or maybe has gone through something similar to what that you have. Then you can help each other out and heal.
The old-world paradigm is...
"Don't wear your emotions on your sleeve. Don't let other people see you sweat. You can't let people see you blah, blah, blah... "
Nope, release it. As long as you don't hurt anybody including yourself, it's okay. If you need to go into a closet and scream your head off, then go into a closet and scream your head off. If you need to jump in a sailboat like I did and be alone for seventeen days at sea and figure stuff out, then by all means, do it. But you don't have to go that extreme.
It amazes me that I kept that crap buried for so long. No wonder I'd get tweaked easy. And there's the key. If you listen to other people who tell you to bury that crap down, from time to time it's going to erupt. Yeah, you let it out a little bit, but you still don't deal with that thing, because you quickly push it back down. You can't see it because you buried it. You're denying it.
You can figure it out when you go inside, admit it and release it in a loving way. You can find it like I did. I realized that underneath all of it was something that I would not admit to myself because I was embarrassed.
Are you dealing with some form of humiliation right now? Is there is something that you're thinking about right now that embarrassed the crap out of you and you're humiliated because of it? It's okay. It is totally okay. As humans, we are supposed to go through all of this and grow, but you won't grow if you don't admit it.
I'm filming the videos because of all of the wonderful comments and questions I have received for my lesson on the 2016 Hay House World Summit, "Run Toward That Which Scares You."
