MOVE

What gets us stuck is using the goodness of fit gap as an excuse.   Whatever we didn’t get as kids produced fear, anger and shame and as a result we’re afraid to move forward.  

Here’s the thing, we’re adults now.  The power is in our hands to choose differently.  And we must.  The pendulum needs to swing toward healing, toward spirit to get unstuck.  Otherwise we run the very real risk of being buried under a mountain of regret.

As Bishop Jakes says, “Don’t die in your nest - don’t die where you got started.”

NEST

If you can put your particular religious beliefs aside for about 30 minutes, I’d like to invite you to look at this video.  

It is on point with the GOODNESS OF FIT I’ve been talking about, and I’ve been talking about it because I’m working on a large project that deals with precisely this critically important issue that underpins all of our pain and suffering.   When I saw Bishop TD Jakes speak of the same thing so beautifully, I had to share it.  

Listen to WHAT he’s saying: http://www.tdjakes.org/  Click on the POTTER’S TOUCH BROADCAST

ADULT

While the gap in our goodness of fit had its impact on us as children when we had no defense, it all changes when we’re adults.  Rather than using these issues as excuses, as adults, we have to come to this sometimes difficult realization....

"All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you."

 --- Joseph Campbell

PUNITIVE

The life as lesson theory feels punitive.  It suggests that we’re defective in some way and some external force with a master plan is making us suffer so we can redeem ourselves.  I don’t buy it.

I think that more often than not we forget that we are that force, that we are what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin so eloquently said, “ We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Our suffering and pain stems from the focus being heavily weighted toward the human experience and only scantily toward the nurturing of our spirit, a nurturing that has nothing to do with religiosity.

In fact we continue to surround ourselves with things that will move us further away from our spirit.  Our hyperactivity, our spending large amounts of time on small things, our obsessive need for drama and NOISE, is the antithesis of nurturing spirit.

Our true punishment is this, it’s this moving away from our spirit.  It isn’t a lesson of life -- it is life.  We are not being afflicted externally, we are afflicting ourselves.  

LESSON

Continuing on with the issue of GOODNESS OF FIT, it’s true we can’t choose our family of origin.  As a metaphysical argument some say that we are born into our family to learn life lessons that are particular to us.  Awesome.  I’m just not sure what I’m supposed to do with that.

I understand that it's a rhetorical way of trying to make sense of our experiences on this earth.  I get that.  My question to the family as lesson theory however is, why does the exact same shit keep showing up?  

Anger, guilt, shame are the trifecta of symptoms that underpin our OCD, addiction, anxiety and depression.  We, as humans, have had to learn the exact same lessons for millennia.  So either we’re not doing a very good job of learning our lessons or it’s a faulty belief at best.  

I mean why can’t we be perfecting our lessons on compassion and awareness and love right from the get-go, why are these lessons arrived at only as byproducts of anger, guilt and shame?

MATCH

Goodness of fit is also a critical measure of whether as children, we received what we needed from our parents.

In other words, did what we need match with what our parents could give.

I don’t mean material things here.

Rather, were our parents able to nurture us in the manner in which we needed to be nurtured? 

All of the ways in which we were mis-matched with our parents, are all of the ways in which we created, out of necessity, mechanisms to bridge that gap.  Mechanisms that manifest as OCD, addiction, anxiety and depression.

Only by understanding this gap can we begin, as adults, to mitigate it, can we begin to nurture the fit we need.  It isn’t too late.

FIT

As in GOODNESS OF FIT* and how we adapted (or did not adapt) to the environment in which we were raised.

As adults we still come up against this goodness of fit.  Every time we make a decision that’s based on what our head tells us, rather than what our heart tells us, we move further away from that GOODNESS of fit.

*Based on the ecological model and the evolutionary adaptability of a species.