If we continue down this path, we’re liable to end up where we’re headed.
– Traditional Buddhist saying

There is no way around it: if you want clarity in your life, you first have to see where, up until now, clarity has been lacking. There’s no leapfrogging to lucidity without understanding where you’re leaping from.
It’s a challenge to become clear, to wake up, become conscious and stop bumping into life. When we wake up, we see what is really important and valuable to us. We can see the path that has been waiting for us all along.
We can begin to live the life we were meant to live.
It’s nice to wake up sooner rather than later so that you don’t have to repeat the same lessons over and over (and over) again. As you’ve probably noticed, when you are in the “not that again” pattern, the lessons only get bigger and harder. Life is trying to get our attention, to wake us up. If we’re in a deep sleep, this can be a real jolt.
Imagine you’re driving on a country road. A grey fog swirls around you. Turning on your headlights only seems to make it worse. Suddenly the fog clears and you see that you’re driving on the wrong side of the road and that a 10-ton truck a quarter of a mile away is coming straight at you.
Do you pause to ponder how you got on the wrong side of the road? Do you think back to your parents’ driving behaviour and try to figure out how it might have affected your own? Do you work on accessing your “inner driver”? No! You pull over. You get out of the truck’s path. Your actions are clear, focused and simple. That’s because you woke up.
But imagine the thick fog does not clear. It continues to obscure your vision. You don’t know you’re on the wrong side of the road, and even though you occasionally have to swerve to avoid oncoming traffic, you keep driving along, still in a fog, still on the wrong side of the road. But because of your frequent near misses, you begin an internal dialogue: “Why does this keep happening to me? What’s my problem? Do I secretly enjoy minor traffic accidents? Why do I attract all these cars? Why do I keep sabotaging my drives? I must be thinking the wrong thoughts; if I thought more positively, maybe this would stop happening to me.”
Preoccupied with these thoughts, you find yourself even more prone to the run-ins you are so busy trying to understand. Many of us have become spiritual roadkill on our hero’s path because we’re asking the wrong questions. Some, like the ones above, might actually cause the fog to thicken. At the very least, asking those particular questions doesn’t lead us to change lanes so we can keep out of harm’s way.
I’ll give you some specific ways to lift the fog from your path, including better questions to ask. Applying these techniques is exciting because when you lift the fog, when you see clearly where you are, you will intuitively know what to do next.
Let me say this again. It sounds so simple, so obvious, that we might miss it. We tend to think important truths have to be complex and hard to grasp. When you see clearly what is before you, you will know in your heart what to do. Your actions will be simple and precise, with no wasted effort.
When the fog lifts and you see the truck speeding toward you, you simply move over to the right lane. No one has to tell you to move over, and you don’t need any advice about how to do it. You don’t need to mull it over; your actions are natural, instinctive and effective. This is because you have a wellspring of wisdom within you just waiting to be tapped.
“That may be well and good,” you say. “But do I really need the 10-ton truck in my path? I got out of the way, but it was a close call, and I was pretty shaken up.” Good point. What we want is gentle course corrections, adjustments made with ease instead of dramatic swerves. We want to see the truck when it’s five miles away, realize our lane error and move over without all the heart-pounding.
That is our aim here: not just to lift the fog, but also to do it in a peaceful, graceful way. Small adjustments and no big messes to clean up – imagine the energy saved! How creative could we be with such clarity instead of wearing ourselves out coping with one near miss after another?
Your fog may be a vague sense of frustration, resignation or cynicism when it comes to your important dreams. You are frustrated because you think you don’t have the time, money, imagination or physical vitality to tackle them. You are resigned to putting them off until life settles down and you’re under less stress. Or you have cynically given up on even dreaming the dreams that thrill your heart. You are convinced that is for other people, not for you.
You are in touch with thoughts like these, congratulations! They are part of the fog and before you can clear that fog away, you have to realize you’re driving in it.
The nature of the fog
The inner conversations that discourage you from going for your dreams may seem fresh and convincing when they’re going around and around in your head. That’s the nature of the fog: punch at it, and it absorbs your fist. Wave your arms to brush it away and it laughs at you. Shine the headlight of analysis on it and you just get more glare.
Allen, who dreamed of a career selling gemstones, had a fog that went like this: “I want to travel to faraway bazaars looking for amber or hike to remote mountain villages where they sell the best jade. But first I’ve got to figure out how to get rid of my fear of failure. I have these success issues that have been with me for years. I’m working on dealing with them now. But I’m not ready to make a move yet. When these feelings improve, I can talk to someone about what it takes to get into the gemstone business, but I need to handle all this first.”
To see your own fog, try this: Get four pieces of paper. With the first paper in front of you, think of a goal or dream that you’ve put aside until... Now take a deep breath and list all the reasons why you’ve put it off. Do this quickly and try to empty out your mind. Even if what you write doesn’t make sense, keep writing down all the doubts, worries and “issues.” What are the excuses you’ve given yourself or others? Get them all down. Then think of another goal or dream you haven’t pursued. On the second piece of paper, write the reasons for this dream deferment. Be as specific as you can.
Finally, think of a third, unrelated goal, preferably one from another area of your life. And you know the drill: get all your reasons down on a third piece of paper. Now read over what you’ve written. You’ll likely see some words or phrases repeating themselves, regardless of the specific dream. You might even spot a theme or story line – What you lack, how others thwart you, a pattern that goes back to your childhood, or a recurring feeling. Take that fourth piece of paper. First put an A, and write all these recurring themes, words or phrases down under that heading.
Now we get to the mechanism behind the mist. On that same fourth page, write down a B. Then think of everything you have told yourself about why these reasons make sense. What do you tell yourself about why you have these particular worries, doubts, frustrations and issues? Jot these reasons down under B. Look at A and B on that fourth page. What you now have is an outline of how your mind looks when caught up in self-analysis. You might feel uncomfortable or tense when looking at this. It may feel claustrophobic or sad when you realize you’ve been living with these thoughts.
Trained as a psychologist, I became adept at analysis. I learned how to hunt down, bag, skin and truss just about any explanation or rationale. I discovered how to serve them up in a stew and I’ve eaten that stew myself, convinced that all these reasons nourished me. They didn’t. Taking them in only forestalled the inevitable: seeing that I wasn’t moving forward or creating what was important to me.
Here’s a personal example: I’m in the psychology department’s old building at UCLA, in my dissertation adviser’s office. I explain to him why my mother’s conflicted relationship with success has made it difficult for me to finish the chapter I had promised to write. I believe what I’m saying, but he just chuckles, “That’s a good one! Okay, I’ll give you two more weeks.” I’m relieved; I got the extension I wanted. But as I leave his office I’m also embarrassed: was that excuse really necessary? It sure didn’t leave me with a sense of satisfaction.
Much later, I went to a weekend seminar in San Francisco, where we were asked to look at the words we use to describe ourselves. I saw then, as my adviser had seen years before, how much energy I used focusing on my internal conflicts. I remember stepping out of the seminar building and thinking: “Did Martin Luther King Jr. have control issues? Did Margaret Mead have family-of-origin conflicts? Did they care if they did? Or were they too busy living out their goals and dreams? What were the questions that guided their lives, and how did they differ from the ones I was asking myself?”
Don’t misunderstand me; there’s a time and place for analyzing doubts and worries and for looking at situations in the past that call out for healing. We all need to make sense of our thoughts and feelings. But there comes a time when we are just spinning the same yarn, again and again, with little to show for it. We remain as we are. This can be true even if our thoughts are deep – especially if they are deep.
I’m not suggesting you stop using your analytical powers. I’m asking instead that you consider the ways habitual thought patterns stave off luminosity. We all have these habits of thought and they are tenacious because they’ve become routine – habitual. They’ve become routine because they have an internal logic; they have “worked” for us in a sense, if only to account for why our lives have turned out as they have. But when we bring only these old patterns of thought to life’s fresh adventures, we run the risk of turning the new into the old.
It is important to acknowledge that our thoughts are hard to control. For example, if someone mentions hot fudge sundaes and then tells you not to think about them, what do you get? Rows of them dancing in your head! Recognizing this is actually good news. When we realize our thoughts are not going anywhere, no matter how much we poke and prod at them, and when we see that poking and prodding them actually creates more fog, we can relax.
In this relaxed state we can shift our attention away from these repetitive doubts and worries and focus it instead on something that’s more interesting to us: our deep-down dreams, for instance.
This is really the fundamental key to luminosity: focus on what you love, what’s interesting to you, what sings to your heart. What you focus on creates your experience of reality. If you focus on endlessly processing your issues, doubts and dilemmas, you get fog. Focus on what you want to create and contribute and the fog begins to lift. Strengthen this focus muscle and the fog recedes further. “Foggy” days or moments will always come around, but they become the exception, not the rule.

From the book Mastering Life’s Energies, copyright © 2007 by Maria Nemeth. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.
www.newworldlibrary.com
or 800/972-6657 ext. 52.