Len Wright, Hypnotherapist, NLP Master Practitioner, Mental Alchemist, Accelerated Evolution and Sub Conscious High Performance Expert speaks to Mark Goblowsky on the Strength Through The Struggle Podcast about Finding Strength in the Gifts of Life.
Zen Len Wright discusses his unique take on Zen in daily life and how it differs from the Zen Monk training and how Zen philosophy and the Zen way of living in a modern world that includes running businesses, having families, dealing with conflict and dealing with people all the time in different stages.
While a Zen monk daily schedule has its own set of challenges it is completely different to trying to run and grow a business with a family and the pressures that we feel walking in this world, but not of this world.
The calm rhythm of predictability of practicing Zen in a monastery environment offers a different environment that can’t be carried out all the time and the daily struggle of life doesn’t offer the same sense of security but limits the opportunity for growth out of the chaotic will of free will, not out of a predictable plan for each day
The recipes for life are very different for what most people are living and predictability isn’t something that lasts forever and creates a false perception that life is predictable but we lose contact that we don’t have any control over our daily events. The myth is in the false thought and false sense of security, comfort and thinking that we are in control, while putting all of our faith in that control and limiting the areas of personal growth that we have.
Everything in life is moving us to letting go of limiting beliefs. You can’t be predictable and be in allowance at the same time.
The predictability is wanting it to go a certain way. Every struggle is wanting things to go a certain way and having it go a different way and not liking the result and this encompasses every struggle. The resistance in life comes, not from the struggle itself but from not liking the result.
Struggles in life are the reason Len has grown stronger and expanded as a human being.
Without the struggle you don’t get stronger. Without resistance you can’t grow. The struggle is something that exists so you have to learn how to use it for you.
People expect what they want to be delivered the way we want it. This is the prediction, and this is part of the problem. While we have this ability to project into the future we also have the ability to believe it is going to happen yet it is not real as it has not happened yet.
Anything that is in the past or in the future is imagination, it is not happening right now. What we’re doing is building this future in our mind which is an illusionary space, it is imagination! By setting an expectation that ‘this is what it is going to be like’ we are setting a limitation parameter (a limiting belief) so that any time it is not going to meet this expectation is a source of resistance, it is a limitation.
In setting this expectation, your focus is on achieving this expectation and the focus is only on the destination and that this is going to be what will make us happy.
We have this idea that we can plan and do everything, that we control everything. Life is lovingly teaching us lessons that this is not the truth and to be ok with the moment being what the moment is, to let go and go for the ride….this is when flow happens.
This isn’t to say that goals and planning are not useful, it is our fixation or attachment on having to go a certain way and have a certain destination or result that creates the struggles that we have to go through to teach us in the end to let go and that we are not the ones that control it.
If you look at a tree in nature does it hold onto its branches? Does it not sway because it does not want to lose things? Or does it fully trust….because in the end, in the next year, it blossoms again.
We have this fixated idea that we know what is best for us in the moment…and it is a false idea.
As Len explains from his own experience, a lot of the times in his own life, the most valuable moments are the ones that he would have turned away and not gone through if he had the choice.
The gifts you need are often the ones that you don’t see, where the wrapping is all the wrong colour for us. It’s part of that mechanism of trying to control what we want over what we can learn. Our fixation verses our growth. Lovingly, the universe continually provides for our growth, which is the only real important thing, while we strive to be able to fill everything else in, instead of our growth….which limits it.
Growth experiences are designed to take you beyond who you are at the time. It would not be a growth experience if you are able to meet it immediately without struggle. Experiences initially appear to be happening to you, not for you. Through growth, you are able to use your philosophers stone, to use that tool, that gift that is given to you by life, to be able to hone yourself, to create a stronger, better version of yourself that is able to let go, one that realizes the illusion of separateness, that can learn how to accept things verses forcing them to work.
How do you learn a valuable skillset, a character trait, if your resistance to it or your see it and are refusing to learn it otherwise? Where if you fail to learn a lesson, life will step in and show you that there is a cause and effect for absolutely everything.
If you keep ignoring your lessons, lovingly, the universe will step in and furnish a lesson that will teach you, sooner or later and it needs to hurt to get our attention.
The lessons we are getting in our life, because they are all different, they are tailor made to what we need to learn, what we need to learn to be able to navigate our waters properly.
Recognized as an old Freemasons song, the old fairytales deep rooted spiritual meaning, row, row, row your boat, really tells that the human body is mostly water (approximately 70%), so we are the vessel that we row through our life and as we row, most of us are rowing frenetically, and out of sync. If you were to see a boat rowing this way down a stream, doing that, the chaos that it would be, and the wake that it would leave, is what most lives are. What this song teaches us, is to row ‘gently’ down the stream…and how are we to do that? Merrily, merrily, merrily….because life is meant to be happy and you’re meant to gently row down that stream because ‘life is but a dream’.
We take our lives so seriously and yet we’re not serious about them. We take our lives seriously because everything has to be exactly the way we say it should be. We don’t take life seriously because we have the order our lives all backed up, where the cart is before the horse.
All Holy Books through time contain a verse similar to the one found in the Bible, “Seek First The Kingdom and All Else Will Be Added To You”. The real meaning to this is that the Kingdom is within, so seek that first. Why? What is the first thing that happens in a struggle? Thought! It is the first thing that happens, it creates the experience, it is the beginning of the sequence of Thought, Word, Deed. So if we seek the inner kingdom first and we look after our thoughts, to look after them, to understand them, to deliberately create through our thoughts, all else will be added to you, Everything else will flow. If you don’t do that, you’re running around all day catching up with your thoughts are telling you, dealing with what your thoughts are telling you about what is happening, who you are through it, if you can handle it or not, berating you, judging. All of these things that limit you, slow you up and create resistance. If you put first that inner kingdom and deal with understanding your thoughts and deal with it in that way, all that resistance is gone, or greatly diminished.
To meet this challenge is about a true understand of what life is. An understanding of illusion and what we call reality, the world of matter. Sometimes the world of matter, matters to much to us. It is the reality but it is created by the real inside first. The plans inside your mind are emitted out. The kingdom inside is the ability to not get swept away with ideas or thoughts that limit you. Being awake in your present moment and present, not multi-tasking and doing a thousand things. Then you see things within your moment that you’re asleep to otherwise. Life obeys your state, not your words. Your words are a part of it but your state is what moves your world. If you’re in a state of chaotic misunderstanding about what you are placing importance on and what you think is really what needs to happen, you lose yourself because you are basing your whole plan on an illusion or a myth that you control all of it.
To go from chaos to calm, from that chaotic life that many of us are living with our thoughts, the way to smooth that out, to get focused, to find that path, it really is a process of growth and you have to have that first understanding of what a mistake is and what perfection is. Perfection is not a destination but the process in of the whole, the process of your growth takes you looking at a situation, seeing it a certain way, walking through it and to be taught a lesson through the whole turmoil and chaos of the story. The whole experience of falling, getting back up, turning around and seeing the lesson of it and becoming new, is the lesson. In alchemist terms it took lead into gold. It took you from a dark place of not understanding through something you fell with, a mistake, that has to be made, to learn…it is part of the process. You fall, you get back up again and learn through perspective and you become new. That whole process that makes you grow is usually produced through your lessons riding in on the back of your experiences.
The alchemists of the middle ages were actually transmuting dark negative states within them, through inner work and seeing things, putting principles in state and seeing through these principles you diminish different states and the vibration you have with it. As an example, if you get angry at something, that’s a dark state that can only put out that same darkness. If you can feel that inside and take that into meditation or do some inner work inside yourself to see that this isn’t doing any good and isn’t the solution and you move it to a point where you are now curious about the problem instead of angry, you have moved this state, this energy, from something that dark and misunderstood to something that is understanding it (curiosity). Curiosity is a much higher state than anger and as such, as curiosity is a higher state than anger, you have transmuted and transformed that one state into a higher state within yourself so now that when you go to speak or do anything it is coming from a state of curiosity than a state of anger. So, the outside world will meet you at curiosity instead of anger.
As an example, in the book Power vs Force, Dr David Hawkins analyses different types of music and how they impact you in a certain way with some being positive and uplifting whereas others take you down into a darker space. However this really looks at what it calls forth within you based on your experiences. So while there is a power or force within the vibration of the music or movie itself and there is the way we meet it and what our perception means to us and this perception part of it is such a valuable tool.
It is our perception or the label we put on the experience that creates how we experience the experience.
Our perceptions are the director of our experiences so when we label things we are telling ourselves how we want to experience that. Therefore, if you go into an experience with the label ‘ahh, not this again’ means you think you have to experience it the same way you experienced it last time, so you are the creator of these experiences.
When you come upon an experience you need to look at it as an opportunity where you don’t have to do something but you get to do something and to look at it as an opportunity for growth as opposed to a burden or overwhelmingly difficult thing where you will never get out of it what you could have.
There are actually scientific reasons that support this approach, firstly, for your own health, when you look at an opportunity openly, not knowing what it is, not knowing what this experience is really going to do for you, because you are just going into it. You can then go through the experience to see what it gives you first and then you save yourself on a chemical and physical level or ‘red carpeting’ the moment and expecting to know what it means.
If you realize that you get to choose in any moment what will empower the forward movement of the experience. If you choose the one way to look at this as ‘why is this happening to me’, the next moment attached to that is met with that energy. You throw the energy forward, effectively asking for more resistance or struggle. However, if you pick for yourself that the experience is going to rise up somehow, you start looking, naturally, for the positive moments to focus on.
The more you expand and stop labeling, the more that a new, different, beneficial thing can come in. If you look at every experience as your teacher, where something, as a student, you can learn from that experience on increasing your tide that rises all ships around you, then every experience, no matter what it is, is teaching us something.
This is what growth is all about.
Growing to a point where you are not controlled by your circumstances, but you are your circumstances, where everything is for your growth.
Buddha once said, that if someone offers you a gift and you do not accept the gift, then who does it belong to in the end? The person who gave it.
All of these things make up your moment. The growth is very expansive. But they are all based on letting go of control, gently down that stream, merrily, merrily….because life is but a dream.
None of this is about attachment or telling you to hold onto your plan like it is the last thing you have….it’s just about gently rowing down your stream. The moment we get attached to how it has to happen, is the struggle we create for that.
Frustration and anger only comes from looking at what people are doing to you, not for you. If you see them as a complete mirror, then why would you get frustrated with the mirror. It has nothing to do with you. Instantly, in moment, you have a choice in every moment. Sometimes you have to work on creating a gap for that choice, because we are so into reaction. But the goal of it is to look and see that that person is them and not you. You have no control over what another person does. You only have control over what you do and what you emit. If you look after what you control, where you place your focus and attention, and you control that really well, then it controls everything else.
In a struggle, the only thing that makes it a struggle, is by looking for where it is attacking you, with the belief that it is not supposed to be there. Whereas, if you flip it around and say that this is exactly what is supposed to be happening, even if you don’t like it inside, but instead of getting involved in it that way, you search for things that you can learn about yourself in it. You can start searching for these secret meanings that come to you versus you labeling them.
Is life happening for you, building you up, taking you higher….or is life trying to beat you down and make you a victim. The choice is always yours as to what to perceive it…and that is the most loving thing, because, in the end, it is all just a dream. So, whatever choice, whatever path you are on, the important to remember is that ‘this too shall pass’. This applies to both the good times and the bad….because it is all just a stream, and if you gently row through it all, it just flows.
The things that we see as bad all have the good in them. As with the Yin and Yang, where the Yin is in the Yang and the Yang is in the Yin, this is simply teaching you that within the experience you are labeling as bad, always had good for you in there. Whereas if you only look for the bad, you’ll only see the bad in it. If you start opening yourself up, not knowing what each experience is, and endeavor to experience each experience brand new, without the label attached to it, and see how it makes you feel through the experience, to gently go and treat yourself well through it, to not compromise yourself through it, to not allow yourself to be swayed either way, to either major feeling, you swim through it equanimously.
Equanimity, is to ride the middle wave, not labeling one way or another, but to give it your own unique label on it, which is just experience. To just be with the experience in the moment, open, not in your mind, not planning or analyzing what it should be, but just to be with the moment and to experience it fully…to be fully present in each moment.
In modern life, we are so rarely present with what it really going on. We are, in our heads, living through the experience in our imagination, which is called excess potential, all that potential we could be creating with and doing but we are spending it in a space of imagination….like building sandcastles where we know the tide is going to come in and wash it away the next day and yet we have to keep building and building again, and then we’re frustrated that things never work out, or ‘this always happens’….because you’re doing the same things that you’ve always done with it, you’re seeing it the same way as you’ve always seen it and making it into the same experience as always by the way that you see that experience.
When you are fully present, the only thing the other person can really experience is love. Part of our problem in our modern life is that we’re living in our imagination. In truth, the place we should be living from is the real moment that is happening. This one moment, this one task, right now and not thinking or being something else or somewhere else. When you’re in your head then you are not really there in that moment that is happening at that time.
If you are not present in the moment then you are simply living an illusion of life and that’s why there is no fulfilment in it.
To be completely present in every single moment, changes everything. There is no future and no past in that ever blossoming present moment and what most people are trying to do is get onto that next moment that is more important than the moment they are in which is where society is distracted, unfulfilled and unhappy.
With too much time and too much excess potential you build worlds that are illusionary and don’t feed any reality as opposed to an experience of mindfulness, to be with the moment, not having the pressure to be a certain way is the most productive any person can be.
When you notice that you are not being present, in the moment, right now, it’s time to pause and bring yourself present again, and then move forward. The myth is that we are trying to run away from the challenges, yet the challenges are the gift, they are the reason we are here, to be able to convert those challenges into love. We are all made from what we are, as carbon based beings, we are conduits for this energy, we are meant all to be alchemists changing that dark into light then expressing the light and when we do that, and we are present to that, present to our experiences and how we are being in our moments…that the real magic happens. Magic turns on, the spark turns on, and life starts participating with you.
Our job is only to control our focus that puts us in the moment. If we are focused on our real moment, and that is all we are doing with our focus, then everything else, (seeking first the kingdom), then everything else is added to us and that is where the flow happens. We’re in that moment, we are therr and all of a sudden there is no resistance and we get to gently get to row down that stream, merrily, merrily, without attachment.