I spent the entire day yesterday mired in procrastination, so it's the perfect thing to write about right now.
I'd been thinking about procrastination a lot actually. A couple times the word flew by in a meditation, and I thought to myself, "hmm...procrastination is like a fear of failure."
It absolutely is, because you constantly delay the onset or the completion of your project because you're secretly afraid it's going to fail. If you have any self-awareness at all, then you already know it's going to fail if you don't start it, so you might say to yourself, "Well, if I fail, I want to be in control of it", because of course, everybody knows it’s a lot better to fail on purpose. That way you can avoid the other monster in your closet, rejection. However, none of this changes the fact that if you didn't try, you've already failed.
So who's with me on this? Anybody holding their hand up besides me? Read on if you are - you'll get something out of this because I'm going to give you a great meditation to try at the end of this. If it makes you feel any better, I'm pretty sure this is just part of the human experience, and like 95% of the population is procrastinating to some degree or other, over some area of their life. If you really want a dose of self-awareness, it’s actually a form of control freakery. Yep, we seek to control the things we feel we have little or no control over, until we learn a better way.
I’m going to give you a better way, so keep reading.
If you read journals like Psychology Today, they'll tell you procrastination is actually a form of self-harm.
If you think about, it makes sense because you know you ought to do what you ought to do, so when y'all don't do what you ought to, you're going to engage by default in a form of self-hatred, or non-self-acceptance. BLAMMO - You just set yourself up for failure. Gee thanks asshole brain.
If someone else talked to you that way, would you put up with it? OH HELL NO. But you'll do these things to yourself. You’ll break commitments to yourself, and then waste more precious time by telling yourself what a jerk you are for dropping the ball. It gets even more f***ed up when you start blaming others, but we won’t get into that today.
So all day I was finding myself putting off doing what I was suppose to be doing, and I dicked around all day, avoiding the question I knew I should have been asking myself.
I'm going to tell you a story I heard once:
There once was an incredibly wise old woman who lived many miles outside of town, in a place where you could only trek by foot, and it took several days to get there. This served the purpose of keeping away the riff raff because the trip was long and uncomfortable and even dangerous at times, and who’s going to go through all that just to ignore what the wise old woman tells them, right? Many people would make the treacherous journey to see her, and she would always tell them at the end, "Do not repeat this to anyone!" as she saw them on their way.
Well as people are wont to talk, eventually one person compared what she said to them with another person, and so on, until they finally realized she'd given every single one of them the same advice:
"What are you afraid to look at?"
And that's exactly what I finally asked myself after firing up a doobie.
Did you know that when you ask yourself a question, your subconscious mind immediately goes to work to find the answer? It's true. Try it sometime. It's a great tool to figure out what's going on up there if you can't seem to resolve an issue. Always frame your questions in a positive way though, as your subconscious doesn't parse nuances like negatives and double negatives in the same way that your conscious mind does. So if you ask yourself, "How do I stop eating a bag of Reese's Peanut Butter cups in bed every night? y'all are probably gonna start getting some chunky thighs from all the peanut butter cups you'll be eating in bed. Instead, re-frame it to a change in activity – Trade it for a positive experience, like meditation. So you could ask yourself something like, "How do I get myself in the habit of choosing healthier activities, like 20 minutes of meditation before bedtime?" And there you go, you just started the process of re-programming your subconscious mind. I'll save that for another blog post.
So I asked myself the question, and I immediately got an answer. It was a pretty powerful revelation that I won't go into here, but here's what I did with the information, once I released it from the deep waters of my subconscious mind:
Actually, it was pretty intense and I had what normally would have been the precursor to a panic attack, but I immediately stopped it in its tracks. (Anybody who suffers with panic attacks will absolutely benefit from doing this by the way.)
I realized that I was really uncomfortable with the information I was opening my eyes to after asking that question, and my heart rate went up and my muscles tightened, so I began to meditate. I actually started smoking marijuana many years ago, to help my panic attacks and get my head out of the way while doing inner work, because I've always been a seeker of esoteric wisdom and knew that through weed, I could expand my mind enough to receive what I call "downloads" from the universe during this state. I have always had a fondness for the wisdom of Terence McKenna, and while he was an advocate of psilocybin, I knew that if I used marijuana exclusively for this purpose, it would hold the same potential of expanding my consciousness. Many people I know say that marijuana actually causes them to have panic attacks. To them I say, it’s probably because you have something you’re hiding inside, and should you choose to explore it, I’ll bet you will solve some sort of problem you’ve been struggling with. I knew there was magic to this – a dance that we do with the universe when we are in step – and if I could allow myself to experience the event without resistance, I would overcome the problem. I taught myself how to stop the onset of panic attacks doing that simple thing.
Letting go of resistance.
Letting go of resistance is the key to overcoming procrastination, panic attacks and pretty much everything that alienates us from living life to its fullest. I can be done with our without mind-altering substances such as marijuana, ayauasca, psilocybin, and even recently, studies have indicated positive responses with lysergic acid... But if you have substance abide problems, it's probably best to avoid these things.
Letting go of resistance. It's a simple idea, but it can be a very difficult one at times. But again, if you’re willing to let go of your stronghold on the fear that keeps your crazy sh*t hidden in the deep recesses of your subconscious mind, you will find, with practice and commitment, you can overcome anything.
One way that can help you let go of resistance is through mindfulness meditation. It's actually, the only way I know of. Learning to be present is much simpler and trickier than the casual observer may think, because our minds love to wander, and without the awareness to exercise mastery over our own minds, we end up following our thoughts down the rabbit hole, or worse, shutting down our feelings, so we don’t have any idea what’s going on up there. Shutting down your feelings is like handing the keys to your freedom over to an idiot. But again, we'll save that for another day.
Here's what I did when I discovered what was behind my procrastination:
I allowed myself to feel what was coming up. It was the beginning of a panic attack, so any of you who suffer from panic attacks know how scary they can be. I asked myself what I was feeling, and where I was feeling it. I offered up complete resignation to the fact that I was feeling scared, uncomfortable and anxious and I let it talk to me. The fear will talk to you because it's your subconscious mind and it thinks it's job is to create that fear as a means of protecting you from something. There's a whole science about the way the brain lights up when this is happening because you're getting your conscious and subconscious minds to talk to one another. It's incredibly powerful.
Now that your conscious mind knows why your subconscious mind has been using this device to alert you to danger, you can stop letting it rule you, and better still, you can address it because you now know WTF your mind was thinking by betraying you that way. What I say is, "Thank you for protecting me from [this thing], but I've found a new way to protect myself that works much better, so you can stop doing that now." Now you've just vaporized another monster from inside your closet, and you can get a good night's sleep. If you practice doing this in whatever areas of your life where issues come up in the form of anxiety, negative feedback loops, procrastination, even pain and illness, you can start to free yourself from unnecessary suffering, and begin to re-program your mind in a positive way, and best of all, you can begin the process of self-mastery. You will always have challenges come up – because that is part of the human experience...it’s why we’re here, but we’re not meant to suffer in perpetuity. We are also here to learn mastery over our challenges, so that we can grow and contribute to making the world a better place.
