Yet far too often, most of us change only when we are faced with a crisis,
trauma, or discouraging diagnosis of some sort. That crisis commonly
comes in the form of a challenge, which may be physical (an accident, say,
or an illness), emotional (the loss of someone we love, for example),
spiritual (for instance, an accumulation of setbacks that has us questioning
our worth and how the universe operates), or financial (a job loss, perhaps).
Note that all of the above are about losing something.
Why wait for trauma or loss to occur and have your ego get knocked off
balance due to that negative emotional state? Clearly, when a calamity
befalls you, you have to act—you can’t take care of business as usual when
you’ve been knocked, as the expression goes, to your knees.
At those critical moments when we’ve really, really grown tired of being
beaten down by circumstances, we’ll say: This can’t go on. I don’t care
what it takes or how I feel [body]. I don’t care how long it takes [time]. No
matter what’s going on in my life [environment], I’m going to change. I
have to.
We can learn and change in a state of pain and suffering, or we can do so
in a state of joy and inspiration. We don’t have to wait until we are so
uncomfortable that we feel forced to move out of our resting state.
Side Effects of Closing the Gap
As you know, one of the key skills you need to develop is self-
awareness/self-observation. That’s a shortcut definition of what I mean
when I talk about meditation in the next chapter. In meditation, you’re
going to look at the negative emotional state that has had such an impact on
your life. You’re going to recognize the primary state of your personality
that drives your thoughts and behaviors so that you become intimately
familiar with every nuance of them. Over time, you’re going to use those
powers of observation to help you unmemorize that negative emotional
state. By doing so, you will surrender that emotion to a greater mind,
closing the gap between who you are and who you have presented to the
world in the past.
Picture yourself standing in a room with arms outstretched, pushing the
opposite walls apart. Do you have any idea how much energy you would