Coming alive, p.1
Coming Alive, page 1
This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2017 by Barry Michels and Phil Stutz
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Michels, Barry, author. | Stutz, Phil, author.
Title: Coming alive : 4 tools to defeat your inner enemy, ignite creative expression & unleash your soul’s potential / Barry Michels and Phil Stutz.
Description: First edition. | New York : Spiegel & Grau, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013595 | ISBN 9780812994117 | ISBN 9780812994124 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Self-actualization (Psychology) | Change (Psychology)
Classification: LCC BF637.S4 S8485 2017 | DDC 158—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013595
Ebook ISBN 9780812994124
randomhousebooks.com
spiegelandgrau.com
Book design by Donna Sinisgalli, adapted for ebook
Illustrations by Ryan Noetzel
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover illustration: © Nicholas Blechman
v4.1
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Introduction
Chapter One: Reclaiming Your Life
Chapter Two: Fighting for the Life Force
A User’s Guide to the Tools
Chapter Three: The Tool: The Black Sun
Chapter Four: The Tool: The Vortex
Chapter Five: The Tool: The Mother
Chapter Six: The Tool: The Tower
Chapter Seven: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness
Chapter Eight: The New World
Appendix: The Tools
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Stay in Touch
By Barry Michels and Phil Stutz
About the Authors
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
—OSCAR WILDE
“Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!”
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
Most people suspect they could live a completely different life from the one they’re now living. In this other life their days are joyful. They’re more confident, they take more risks, the things they do feel more meaningful. It’s as if—in this alternate existence—they’ve plugged into a different kind of energy, an energy that makes anything seem possible.
What they suspect is true. This energy is real and it has the power to change lives. We call it the Life Force. It’s the great prize of the universe—immortal, unstoppable, endlessly creative.
Most of us have experienced the Life Force in some way. You may have felt it at the birth of a child. It might have emerged as an urge to play an instrument that you gave up on when you were younger. Maybe you were stuck on something you were writing and then suddenly the solution came to you out of nowhere. Or perhaps you felt a dizzying grace when members of your family treated one another with love. There are an endless number of examples, each one reflecting the guiding, creating, infinitely nurturing qualities of the Life Force.
The most significant use of the Life Force is that it allows each of us to put our stamp on the world, to give it something that is uniquely our own. It doesn’t matter if it’s something huge and public or something humble and private, as long as it’s meaningful to you. When you use the Life Force in this way, you feel fully alive.
But most of us get no more than a quick glimpse of this other life before a curtain drops and we lose touch with it—wondering if it ever really existed. We find ourselves back in tedious “normal” life—stripped of promise, focused on what we can’t do, not on what we can. The source of our powerlessness, we believe, is some painful personal problem we are unable to overcome. It doesn’t matter what the problem is—what matters is that you’re unable to conquer it.
Here are some of the ways our patients describe problems they’ve been unable to vanquish. Do any of these statements sound familiar to you? Do they apply to you or someone in your life?
I can’t control my thoughts. I scan my life looking for things to worry about. It’s like I’m torturing myself.
I feel like there’s this in-group I can never be a part of. It’s like there’s something wrong with me. When I’m around people my mind fills with negative thoughts about myself.
I can’t stand up to my boyfriend because I’m too afraid of losing him. On nights when I’m not with him I drive past his house to make sure he’s not out with someone else.
I feel overwhelmed by the amount I have to get done, yet I sit in front of the TV like a zombie. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
The world is unfair. People don’t treat me the way I deserve. When my feelings are hurt I don’t get over it for days.
The nature of the problem is different for each of these people. But they have one thing in common: their problems seem insurmountable. Going to therapy and understanding the “cause” of the problem is no guarantee they can solve it—what we’ve found (after a combined seventy years of experience as practicing psychotherapists) is that “understanding” isn’t the key to overcoming emotional problems.
So what is? Hidden behind each problem is a force working to make sure you don’t solve it. When you can’t overcome an emotional problem you feel powerless, and getting what you want from life feels impossible. This sense of impossibility keeps spreading—a poison in your soul. Eventually you give up on expressing who you really are, on living the way you suspect you could.
Being unable to solve your personal problems isn’t an indicator of lack of potential. It’s a sign that a powerful adversary is blocking your access to the Life Force.
But concepts and theories won’t give you access to the Life Force. You can’t think yourself back to life. To free yourself, you need to feel the forces of life as they flow through you.
So how do you access the Life Force? You need tools. Imagine a can of soup. If you want to know what the soup tastes like, reading the side of the can won’t help; you need to actually taste it. Unless you have the hand strength of a superhero, this is impossible without a can opener.
Think of this book as a can opener for your soul. It will give you the tools you need to access the Life Force and defeat your inner enemy. Only then will you discover what you’re truly capable of and come alive in a way you never have before.
Phil exposes the inner enemy that traps you in a limited existence, and guides you through the first steps toward activating your full potential.
HOW I CAME ALIVE
I became aware of the power of the Life Force as a college student—but it wasn’t part of my course work. At seventeen, I was already in my sophomore year. Physically and emotionally immature, I belonged back in high school. During my freshman year I had indulged my greatest love—basketball. When I was sixteen years old, I played on the best freshman team the school had had in years.
Now I wanted to move up to the varsity. I wasn’t ready. I needed to wait a year and get bigger and stronger. But I was a gym-rat whose pulse would quicken at the sound of the bouncing ball. I made the team—barely—and then I got what I deserved. I spent the next two years “riding the pine.” (The pine was the wooden bench the scrubs sat on during games.)
Worse than not playing was the dismissive way the coach treated the scrubs. By the time I was a senior, my confidence was destroyed. But what happened in that final season prepared me for the future in a way I never could have anticipated.
The team was even better than when I was a freshman. The best player was an All-American point guard. I was his substitute, which meant I only played when he was injured or had fouled out—usually when the score was close and the crowd was going berserk.
If I sat inertly watching, by the time I entered the game I’d be so cold I could barely move. So I’d “put myself in the game” from the bench. I’d jump up and down, scream at the top of my lungs, yell out where the screens were, etc. Besides keeping me loose, it had an effect I didn’t anticipate—it lifted up the energy of the guys actually playing.
The best moments were when my excitement spread to the rest of the team. I learned that I could inspire others to do things they’d never done before. It was at those moments that I felt most alive. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was being prepared for my future.
RECOGNIZING THE LIFE FORCE
Winning was great, but the most alive part of the experience—the part I still remember fifty years later—was feeling that inner fire grow. The more powerful the other team, the more difficult the challenge, the more inspired we became. The drive to experience this inspired state is what moves competitive athletes to train for hours every day.
But sports are just one place to discover untapped potential. As a psychiatrist, my job isn’t to win basketball games, it’s to help people discover what they’re capable of. This happens in obvious ways, like helping them get a better job, be a stronger leader, or break through a creative block. But our most important potentials aren’t so obvious: to give and receive love, to listen to other people, to accept what life brings, to be patient—the spiritual and emotional abilities that work inside us and are the essence of what it means to be human. If you were building a fire, they would be the ring of stones that holds in the fire’s heat, allowing the flames of inspiration to grow and connect you to what I came to call the Life Force.
The Life Force speaks constantly—not in words, but through events. You can feel it as an undeniable presence guiding you. More commonly, you’ll feel its presence for brief moments, usually in reaction to a deeply moving event: the birth of a child, the act of falling in love, or a trip to a faraway place that awakens something deep within you.
Or it can emerge without explanation as a sudden insight into another person, as the solution to a problem that’s defeated you for months or as a burst of creative expression that comes from somewhere beyond you. These moments of inspiration can seem random, but they’re reminders that the Life Force is always there.
But knowing the Life Force is there isn’t enough if you don’t know how to connect to it. Look around. The people you see living inspired, expansive lives are the exceptions. The vast majority of human beings are caught in limited, joyless lives—every attempt to change seems thwarted.
Maybe you’re a songwriter with an idea for a film script. Rather than becoming excited about writing in a new medium, it feels beyond you and you give up. Or maybe you’ve developed strong feelings for a person you’ve always thought of as a friend, but when you’re around him you automatically close yourself off. Or perhaps you’ve run a lot of 5Ks and you’d like to run a marathon, but you’re not willing to commit to the time it takes to train for one.
All of these people want to open a new door in their lives, but the door is locked. There is only one key: the Life Force itself. But we’ve forgotten how to find the Life Force. In so doing, we’ve lost the key to our own future. How could we lose something so priceless?
Because we look for it in the wrong place. In our consumer culture, we look outside ourselves for everything. Products are sold with the claim they will magically solve life’s problems. The right hair conditioner will attract the perfect mate. The right wristwatch will give you the aura of success. A new car, a new lover, or a new home may create temporary excitement—but it doesn’t last. Like a child excitedly playing with a Christmas present he’s just unwrapped, we quickly lose interest and move on to another gift.
This fixation on things outside of us makes change impossible. If you want to open the door to a future with real potential, you’ll need to access the inner power of the Life Force. You won’t be able to see it, you can’t hold it in your hand, but when it’s flowing through you it will inspire you to do things you didn’t think were possible.
THE LIFE FORCE IN HISTORY, NATURE, AND PEOPLE
The belief that an invisible animating energy underlies our existence is thousands of years old. Unlike our modern, mechanical notion of energy, which we understand via mathematics, this is a living energy that we feel inside us. In Eastern religions, this energy, or Life Force, is known variously as prana (in Indian philosophy and medicine), lung (in Tibetan Buddhism), and chi (in Chinese philosophy and medicine). In the Old Testament, it was called ruach, the breath of God, which gave mankind not only life, but the spirit to evolve.
The Life Force itself may be invisible, but evidence of its power is everywhere. It created life on earth and, over untold eons, drove evolution from single-cell organisms to the unimaginable complexity of the human brain. Every seed that sprouts into a full-grown plant, every salmon that fights its way against the current to spawn, every sun-seeking weed growing through cracks in the sidewalk, is an expression of life’s unstoppable energy.
How does this affect you as an individual? The songwriter, lovesick friend, and runner were stuck; maybe they’d failed so many times they lost hope that change was possible. No amount of talking or analyzing could free them from their dark conclusions. But the Life Force affects you in a way that thinking can’t. You can feel its inspiring presence. When you do, you experience a force that has sustained all living forms for millions of years.
It’s natural to think of the Life Force as sustaining growth in nature—the grass growing, fish swimming, birds flying, etc. But the Life Force is capable of something more: it can fuel the inner growth of each of us. When you learn how to use its energy it becomes the antidote to the personal problems that fill us with a sense of powerlessness.
Every human being is blessed with the ability to use the Life Force in this way, but unlike its workings in nature, harnessing its power for inner growth requires a conscious choice.
YOU MUST CHOOSE TO INSPIRE YOURSELF
Making this choice in your head isn’t enough; you register your choice through action. Living a life filled with unstoppable passion doesn’t happen by itself; it requires a heightened Life Force, and that takes work. Many times we build our Life Force without realizing what we’re doing. When I was screaming at my teammates from the bench it didn’t occur to me that I was stimulating their collective Life Force. But the more I did it, the more familiar it became, until it became a ritual I looked forward to.
Athletes in every sport, on every level, have rituals designed to stimulate their Life Force. Observe the players’ rituals before a game. The hopping, bouncing, slapping, and bumping might look like an overly aggressive dance number, but actually is a celebration of the Life Force.
Athletics isn’t the only arena that benefits from an expanded Life Force. Any role that requires you to lead, to create, or to perform—an actor, a lawyer in court, a teacher, etc.—benefits from a strong Life Force.
The most universal practice for tapping into the Life Force is really a number of practices—meditation, prayer, reading, journal writing, exercise—that make up the morning rituals that so many people swear by. Rather than preparing you for a single event, like a game, a play, or a public address, the rituals prepare you for the entire day to come.
Every time you “practice” these activities—all of them or a select few—you are making the “choice” to apply the Life Force to your own growth.
THE GUY WITH THE GUN
If choosing to trigger the Life Force is an action that anyone can take, each of us is free to bring this power into his or her life. But remarkably, even when we know it’s available to us, we don’t activate it. Instead we make a choice that makes us weaker: we give up on something out of laziness, avoid social situations out of insecurity, yell at a subordinate for an unavoidable business setback. We look back in wonder and ask, “Why did I do that? What was I thinking?” And the most disturbing question: “Why do I keep making this choice over and over?” The answer is that these weren’t choices any more than you have a choice when a mugger puts a gun to your head and tells you to empty your pockets.
The “guy with the gun” is forcing you to make the choice he wants you to make, not the choice that connects you to life. His goal is to deaden you and take away your freedom and your future. He doesn’t want your money; he wants your passion, your inspiration, your potential—all for himself.
The guy with the gun is a symbol, but of what? It would have to be something of immense power, strong enough to make you repeat the same choices even after you realize how bad they are for you.
We think of ourselves as rational beings with good reasons for the things we do. The last thing we want to admit is that a force we’re not aware of is making decisions for us. Especially one that has an agenda that is completely at odds with the way we want to live.
But admit it or not, this “other” force is real. It’s more than the result of psychological damage, though that makes its effects stronger. Present from birth, it’s an irrational force built into every human being. It’s a part of me, you, and everyone else.
Its presence doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you. It’s not an illness, nor is it a punishment. But it’s always there, and every commitment you don’t keep, every challenge you avoid facing, every impulse you give in to, is the work of this force. When you wake up at 4 a.m. worried about paying your mortgage, when you hate someone so much you can’t concentrate on your own work, when you’ve been publicly humiliated and think the whole world is laughing at you, you are seeing the world through the eyes of this force.
