Comments on: A Life Lived Well

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 05:34:25 +0000

Thanks all for your comments. I especially love the line “you can’t effort your way into peace.” In many ways, this is what I know in my mind. But have yet to translate it to my heart and mind and lived life. Onward I suppose. Deep breaths….

By: shorelinedre

shorelinedre — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:28:31 +0000

It’s ironic — you can sense the suffering associated with striving for perfection, then say, “I am working on this problem.” Don’t work too hard, as it is impossible to perfectly eradicate perfectionism!

Seriously though, try to just listen to what your mind has to say about what would happen if you were to stop struggling to improve and stop trying to solve these perceived problems within yourself. Then ask if it’s really *true* or just a very convincing *thought*.

May you be peaceful,
Chris

By: shorelinedre

shorelinedre — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:13:40 +0000

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa is a book that immediately comes to mind after reading your post. It seems like you may already have an inkling of the concept of spiritual materialism — you say things like “we hurriedly find better pithy and inspirational quotes and clearer places to post them.” You seem to also have a dawning awareness of the futility in this.

The trance-like feeling of there being something missing or lacking, feeling “caught in a hologram,” — that is the feeling that seems to be driving your actions. But you can’t solve a problem with the same mindset that creates it. You can’t come to a place of wholeness and peace by way of the “good you” struggling to subjugate the “bad you.” You can’t effort your way into peace. Peace comes through releasing the need to fight and win. Peace comes through the cessation of effort and struggle, not through greater amounts of it. The effort and struggle to be peaceful and happy is like a dog chasing it’s own tail — you never get it and it just tires you out.

Try to ask yourself, gently, if it is possible that there might already be a wholeness to life that you are wrongly perceiving as a problem to get over. And don’t try too hard to find it!

May you be peaceful,
Chris

By: (Rev) John Gaffney

(Rev) John Gaffney — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 15:12:13 +0000

I felt exhausted when I was reading and especially when I finished your entery.I may have that same bug in me. I’m retired and have no responsibilities but I wake up each morning with my head pounding with all the things I “should do”. Fortunately I married well and my wife constantly attacks my “shoulds” and I learn to replace it with “I would like to”. Sadly I will take the “shoulds” to the grave. I often blame it on my German mother and the Catholic faith that says that we should always strive for “perfection”. Like you, I am woking on this problem. Sometimes I escape into Nature, which is so healing and forgiving.

By: Rejecting destructive theology, life and death, and more from UU bloggers « uuworld.org : The Interdependent Web

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:15:26 +0000

[...] feels trapped between striving to live well—and actually living [...]

By: lydia

lydia — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:19:59 +0000

I know what you mean. Somewhere along the way, I learned how to turn off that drive to constantly be better, faster, stronger (to use a Kanye lyric) in my head, but that didn’t stop the guilt from not achieving.

By: naokihan

naokihan — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:26:30 +0000

This was a nice post. I enjoyed reading it. I am not anywhere close to being as decorated as you are, but I do have to say that in the end all of that won’t really matter. What really matters is if we lived the life that we can honestly say we would want to live over again. Even if it meant you had to live through all the bad times again. Keep up the good work.

~Naoki