How do you sit quietly in the middle of a storm? - Search Engine Podcast →

When Rev first wanted to deepen her meditation practice, she started going to retreats. A retreat might last five days, a week or longer. Often these retreats are entirely silent, meaning for the whole time you will not talk.

Rev:

“You realize that in this spaces that are set just so and everything is right and it’s all prepared, you still manage to drive yourself nuts. And to hate people and to love people, you do the whole gamut in there in a little tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny constructed container. And yet you manage to play out all of the shenanigans, do all the things. You hate people, you love them, you want to have sex with them, you want them to get as far away as possible. You know, the smallest things hurt your feelings, you get upset, you get cold and distant. You do all the things and you realize, well, wait a minute, if all of this is here, even though I’m in a different space, maybe that I have something to do with creating all of this and it’s not everybody else’s fault. I might have to take responsibility for my life.

PJ:

So it’s like the thing that it offers or one of the things it offers is that if it’s like you find out that even if everything were taken away, like the things we think the world is doing to us, when you take away the world, you see that we do them to ourselves.

It reminds me of something Tim Ferriss recently quoted on a podcast episode with Elizabeth Gilbert:

“How are we complicit in creating the conditions we say we don’t want?”

He was quoting Jerry Colonna from another episode. Jerry elaborates:

I like to use the word complicit and not responsible. 90% of the time when I first ask that question, people hear the word “How have I been responsible for the conditions?” Complicitness is important, because it’s relieving the person from the burden of feeling responsible for all the shit in their lives, because that’s not fair to carry that responsibility. But it’s helpful to think of ourselves as somehow being served by the challenges that we’re going through.

The second piece of that is that “I say I don’t want.” And that sort of unpacks that notion even further, which is there’s something oftentimes about the way in which we operate and the way we set up the conditions of our lives to be in unconscious service to us. The psychological term is secondary gain. But there are ways in which we find ourselves repeating patterns in our life. We always date the same type of person. We are always finding ourselves in the same kind of job. We’re always frustrated by the same sorts of situation. And so it’s really useful to sort of start to unpack that. So that’s that question.

Rev’s observation that “when you take away the world, you see that we do them to ourselves” strikes right at the heart of Jerry’s observation that we are complicit in creating the conditions. Our internal narrative, our internal experience becomes externalized in the world around us through our interactions, relationships, and behaviors. It follows that to improve our experience in the world, we might start by improving our internal world.