Many moons ago, I wrote a list of 12 Prin­ci­ples that were the basis of my under­stand­ing, both of my life and of my coun­selling prac­tice. I’ve been think­ing about pulling them together into a small book that I could give to new clients.

Just the other day, a new client sent me some bio­graph­i­cal data, and I replied with some other, and to me, more use­ful ways of inter­pret­ing this data. My client replied that she’d have to think about what I wrote, as I was speak­ing from an entirely new per­spec­tive, some of which she was hav­ing trou­ble grasp­ing. This was even more rea­son to have a go at this project.
I decided that I’d, at least for now, tackle each of the top­ics here, in the blog. We’ll see how it goes.

1. If life has any mean­ing, it is this: each event of life has the poten­tial to bring wis­dom. The wise per­son is able to see through the events of life to their essence, in a moment of sim­ple engagement.

Part of the game of life is learn­ing to see through the ‘rules’ to a clearer under­stand­ing of what’s really hap­pen­ing. Here’s a thought for you:

You are the cen­tre of the universe.

No, really.

Take a look around you. Every­thing that is “out there” has you as it’s cen­tre. All the way out to infin­ity. There’s stuff all around you, all the time, and there you sit, right in the mid­dle of it all. Other peo­ple sur­round you.

6.5 bil­lion of them, on this planet, all rotat­ing around you.

I’m only kind of jok­ing here, as this is actu­ally how it is. Of course, it’s also true for every­one else, mean­ing that there are, on this planet, 6.5 bil­lion cen­tres of the uni­verse. But our con­di­tion­ing tends to mean that we for­get that what applies to us applies equally to others.

We get caught in the, ‘me, me, me’ drama quite eas­ily. When I begin to work with clients, this is the first issue we must deal with.

The prob­lems that bring clients to me are always of the “This is not how it is sup­posed to be going” variety.

In one of her bet­ter moods…

I was watch­ing my 6 year old grand-niece the other day, as she flit­ted from one thing to another, butted into every pho­to­graph being taken, made count­less demands on the adults—for food, time and atten­tion. At one point, she turned up the vol­ume on the stereo, and then got annoyed that the adults were talk­ing. Clearly, she sees the world as her oys­ter, and the rest of us as pawns in the game she is playing.

We make allowances for this behav­iour in our chil­dren.

It’s harder to call peo­ple on it as they grow up, or get older—perhaps the bet­ter choice of words. One woman of our acquain­tance, who did and still does a ton of self-development work, used to annoy her­self reg­u­larly, and then start lit­er­ally run­ning around the house, loudly com­plain­ing that we weren’t tak­ing her seri­ously enough. This was always con­nected to her threat­en­ing to leave—“I’m going to take my toys and never come back! So there!” She’d get even more annoyed when we didn’t give in to her or ask her to stay.

Clients list off mul­ti­ple things that have gone wrong
(from their perspective.)

The have bad genes, or have trou­ble keep­ing their jeans on, or find­ing some­one who wants to take them off. They are sad, or depressed, or angry, or bored, or dis­gusted, and yet every­one around them keeps doing stuff that forces them to stay caught in their bad feel­ings. They end­lessly tell their defec­tive part­ners what to do and are furi­ous when the part­ner (or par­ent, or sib, or child) won’t lis­ten, change, and thank them for their great advice.

Sit­ting in the mid­dle of their uni­verse, sur­rounded by the mess that they have made, They adopt the face of the beatific 3-year-old, and say, “Who, me?”

I begin, as I sug­gested in our short series on ask­ing “What do you want?,” by ask­ing clients to do one thing—to accept that the mess around them is their mess. How they are, who they are, and with whom they are in rela­tion­ship (and with what —jobs, bank accounts, debts, edu­ca­tion level, etc.) all of this is there, in their lives, by choice.

You are indeed the cen­tre of your uni­verse, and like the sun, you exert gravity—you attract stuff. That great suck­ing sound is you, cre­at­ing your life.
If you expect that any of this is going to change, just because you want it to, with­out you hav­ing to first, accept respon­si­bil­ity for it, and then to change some­thing—well, good luck to you.

The only way to change your life is to accept that what sur­rounds you is yours, and who you are is you!

Once you make this concession—once you stop blam­ing fate, or god, or exter­nals for dump­ing this stuff on you—you have the chance to shift your rela­tion­ship to life.

For now, let’s just see what this sort of wis­dom might look like.

First of all,

1. Life is exactly as it appears. What this means is that life is going on around you, peo­ple are doing what they do, the econ­omy is doing it’s thing, wars are fought, and from the ridicu­lous to the sub­lime, this is life. Peo­ple are going about their lives, and life is going on as it does.
2. Peo­ple do what they do. No one is doing stuff to you. Now, sure, some crappy stuff may hap­pen to you, but that’s just what hap­pens. Acci­dents hap­pen, of course, and you didn’t deserve it—you’re not being pun­ished, etc. Peo­ple around you are act­ing from within their own uni­verse, and do what they do from within their expe­ri­ence and understanding.
3. You can’t prove any­thing to any­one. Your per­spec­tive is so unique to you as to have no other match in the uni­verse. Stuff means what it means to you.
4. Wast­ing time try­ing to get oth­ers to declare you right is futile.
5. Wis­dom is work­ing with your­self—all aspects of you, from where you are, with­out a ton of time spent try­ing to fig­ure it all out. You start where you are, make choices about what you want to exper­i­ment with next, and you eval­u­ate your expe­ri­ence based upon actual results.

There is no need to con­tinue to play with the mess you’ve created.

All that’s required is a broom and dust­pan. That most peo­ple would rather play with the mess, and feel sorry for them­selves, does not mean that this changes the mess.

Wis­dom is twofold here.

First, you admit that you, and you alone, have cre­ated the life you have right now.

Sec­ond, you decide that you’re not going to stay stuck in the mess out of stub­born­ness, lack of moti­va­tion, or con­fu­sion. You’re going to clean things up, rec­og­nize the trig­gers that got you stuck in the first place, and as those trig­gers arise, you’re going to walk rapidly in the other direction.

True wis­dom is rec­og­niz­ing that noth­ing has to hap­pen the way it has always hap­pened, noth­ing means any­thing other than what you make it to mean, and sat­is­fac­tion comes from doing what works and drop­ping what doesn’t.