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Happiness. It’s a loaded word. Call it contentment. Inner peace. Whatever we call it, let’s all agree that it is what all humans want in life.

The core problem most people have is they pursue paths that don’t lead to happiness. Society, our parents, our friends…they all send us in the wrong direction when it comes to being a happy, contented person.

A funny, wise story from the 13^th century Sufi mystic, Nasreddin, illuminates this beautifully. It goes like this:

One evening, Nasreddin was on a sidewalk looking through the grass and bushes under the light of a lamp post. A friend of his walked by and asked what Nasreddin was doing.

“I’m searching for my house keys,” said Nasreddin.

The friend offered to help, and the two continued searching under the light of the lamp post.

After a while of this, the friend asked,

“Where did you last have your keys?”

“Back at the house,” replied Nasreddin.

Exasperated, the friend shouted,

“Then why are we looking here?!”

Nasreddin plainly stated, “Because the light is better here.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is us.

How?

Keys=Happiness

First, let’s break down what’s what here. The keys represent happiness. That’s what we’re looking for and having so much trouble finding.

The light shining from the lamp post is what most of us, misguidedly, pursue in life, thinking it will make us happy.

What kinds of things do we search for under the lamp light of life?

-Relationships that we think will cure the broken feeling we have inside.

-Careers that provide the power and wealth that will give us the notoriety and respect we desperately crave…because we’re broken inside.

-Pursuing the perfect body by working out two hours a day and eating 1,500 calories a day of tasteless protein and kale shakes.

-Working your tail off to go to the best college, then the best law school, then the top federal judge clerkship, then make partner at a blue-chip law firm…all because you think this will bring happiness.

Unfortunately, none of those things brings sustained happiness. They provide short-term Dopamine hits that always, always, always fade away.

So why do we get down on our knees and search futilely for our keys in the light, when we know full well that they aren’t there?

The ego fuels the light

Therein lies the rub, because most of us don’t know that we won’t find our keys in the light. And the reason we don’t know is that the ego is the entity that fuels the light.

It says to us, in effect,

“Hey! Look how bright it is over here. Come over here and look for your happiness. It’ll be great!”

The point is that the light is attractive. Alluring. Enticing.

And so is money. And power. And romantic love. And Harvard degrees. And perfectly shaped butts.

I hope you realize how crucial it is to be aware of this. It’s everything.

Where to focus your attention

Because once you’re aware that you’ve been searching for your keys under the lights and that you’ll never find them there, you can train your attention where it needs to be.

Which is…

On the house. The dark house, to be exact.

What does the house represent? Our inner world. Our insides.

The house is dark and scary

And why did I emphasize that the house is dark? Because examining our insides can be scary. Foreboding. Mysterious.

But like it or not, folks, our keys lie somewhere in that dark house so that’s where we need to search for them.

How do we do conduct that search? Fifty million pages have been written about that in some form or other. I’ll offer what my favorite spiritual teachers, Ram Dass, Michael Singer and Eckhart Tolle, have taught me.

First, look at your life and see what ways you’re searching in the light for your keys.

-Are you working ninety hours a week as an associate at a prestigious law firm and feeling miserable most of the time?

-Are you constantly searching for the “right” guy and having no luck?

-Are you always game for trying the latest fad diet, fad workout regimen or even fad spiritual trend?

What do we do once we identify these areas where we’re searching for our keys in the light? We open the front door to our dark house by asking ourselves a fundamental question:

“Why am I doing this?”

Not in an accusatory or denigrating way as in, “Come on, you idiot. You work all the time and you’re miserable. Why the hell are you doing this?!”

No. We ask the question non-judgmentally.

Then we do our best to relax and listen to what comes up, however painful it may be.

It’s about looking inside, not outside

If I were to sum it up it would be this: Instead of looking outside (in the light) to cure what ails us inside, we need to go inside (the house) to cure what ails us inside.

Maybe after posing his question in his dark house the lawyer hears,

“Mom and dad made it abundantly clear to me that they’d love me more if I became a successful lawyer like dad was rather than pursue acting which was what my gut told me.”

What we’re doing when we explore our dark houses is searching for our truth. We’re searching for why we do what we do and why we are the way we are.

I’ve found that talk therapy can be very useful in helping us navigate the scary and often confusing rooms of our inner house and I highly recommend it.

The takeaway

The purpose of this piece, which is massively important, is to make you aware that most of us search for happiness under the bright lights of the streetlamp.

You won’t find it there.

So consider walking out of the light and over to the dark house.

See if you can muster the strength and courage to open the door and walk in.

The keys to your happiness lie inside.

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I’ve written frequently about the importance of responding and not reacting during tense, confrontational situations.

It’s the difference between possibly resolving a dispute in a constructive manner that benefits you or dooming yourself to outcomes that cause you great harm. That harm can be as minor as an hour of giving the cold shoulder to your “opponent,” or as serious as ending up in divorce court.

Bottom line: It’s worth putting in the work to avoid those explosions.

But what is that work? What can we do to save ourselves from ourselves?

I try to approach these challenges from a practical, logical standpoint. Here’s what I’ve come up with on the explosion thing.

Those critical first seconds

First, so many of the fractious scenes we encounter come down to how we respond in those first few seconds after our inner lava has been stirred. Most of us don’t make it past those first moments. We explode.

I’ve gotten comments from many readers attesting to how difficult it is to make it past the ‘reaction’ phase to the ‘respond’ phase.

Fine. The key question then becomes: What can we do to strengthen our ability to get through those first few seconds without exploding?

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In all the years I’ve been writing about and studying the spiritual path, nothing has vexed me more than the idea behind attachment.

And it’s important. Why? Because attachment lies at the heart of our spiritual journey.

You know who thought so? The Buddha, one of the wisest beings to ever live, who said:

“The root of suffering is attachment.”

Sounds pretty significant to me.

The types of attachment

What is attachment? There are a few categories.

One would be attachment to things. Cars, a special coffee mug, Manolo Blahnik shoes, a painting hanging on your bedroom wall.

We become attached to ideas and positions. Democrat. Republican. Socialist. Stoic. Fiscal conservative but social progressive.

We attach ourselves to things being a certain way. I need a clean kitchen and bathroom before I go to bed. I need the exact right shade of white, out of the fifty that I’ve examined, to paint my kitchen.

Attachment to our kids

Then there’s the big Kahuna: People. We become attached to boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, friends and the Grand Poobah of them all: Our children.

I think of attachments as things, ideas and people that I hold on to. The Buddhists would call it clinging.

The modern teacher most associated with attachment is Ram Dass, one of my favorite human beings. His is one of two pictures sitting on my desk, the other being his guru, Neem Karoli Baba.

Ram Dass is the one who taught me the ins and outs of attachment in various writings and lectures of his. He’s also the source of the perplexity of it all. How so?

What he’s saying is, “Don’t be attached to your Lexus SUV. Don’t be attached to your job. Don’t be attached to your French Poodle…” and on and on.

The perplexity of attachment

My first response upon hearing this is, as I’m sure it is with many of you, “So you’re asking me to go through life not caring about anything? What’s the point of living?”

Therein lies that perplexing subtlety from the article title. Because what he’s saying is that, of course we should care about things in life. We just shouldn’t become attached to them.

As Ram Dass put it,

“Our journey is about being more deeply involved in life, and yet less attached to it.”

Which leads to the central question on the whole concept: What’s the difference between non-attached caring-being deeply involved in life and attachment?

My Masters mug bites the dust

Here’s a small example from my life that will shed light. I went to the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, in 2015, and had a blast. My brother and I bought tons of shirts, hats, etc., that can only be bought at the tournament. It’s some of the most valuable swag in all of sports.

One of those items was a beautiful mug with the Masters logo on it. It was my go-to mug for six years, the one I put in the freezer and used for my post-workout seltzer water with lemon or for a beer at dinner time.

One day I retrieved the mug from the freezer, put it on the counter, then proceeded to get my seltzer and lemon, something I’d done hundreds of times before.

But this time, the icy part on the bottom of the mug caused it to slide off the counter and smash into a hundred pieces. Bye, bye Masters mug.

My previous self would have been anguished over this because I’d have developed a strong attachment to it. The more spiritual me?

“Dang, my Masters mug broke. We had a good six years, my friend. Sorry to see you go. Life goes on.”

And that’s it. It was gone and I didn’t look back. That’s not to say that I was happy it broke. Far from it. I really liked that mug. I just never allowed an attachment to develop with this inanimate object that caused me to need it.

I cared about the mug, but I wasn’t attached to it.

The tough one comes when Ram Dass talks about attachment to our kids. Are parents not supposed to worry if their kid is struggling? It seems impossible.

When asked about this once, Ram Dass said,

“Attachment is attachment.”

Whether it’s a beer mug or a precious child, attachment isn’t good for our well-being.

Ego is at the center of it

Why? The answer lies in what forms these attachments in the first place. It’s one word. Any guesses?

Ego.

Sorry for being a broken record on this but all roads lead back to ego as the central player in the human drama.

Fortunately, Ram Dass teaches us that there’s a way to use attachment for growth. He said,

“A feeling of aversion or attachment toward something is your clue that there’s work to be done.”

What work? Letting go.

If you spill red wine on your favorite pair of white jeans and go into despair over it, notice that. Then relax, breathe and do your best to let go of that attachment.

If your son fails his math final (mine is studying in the kitchen right now for his!), relax and let go.

And know this: A parent is of far greater value to their kid when in a state of relaxed non-attachment than when they’re freaking out and only adding kindling to the fire.

Put another way: True love springs from a place of peaceful non-attachment, not from fear-based attachments.

The takeaway

It takes a lot of work to get to that state of peaceful non-attachment. But there is no more valuable work we can do.

As the Buddha said:

“The person who clings to nothing of the past, present and future, who has no attachment and holds on to nothing — that person, I call a Holy Person.”

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Let me state up front that I am not a high being. Far from it.

High beings are those like Ramakrishna, Ramana Maharshi and Neem Karoli Baba, people who shed their egos and became close to pure consciousness.

Me? I still fly off the handle when my teenage daughter makes my nine-year-old daughter cry. I have a ways to go…

The question I’d ask

But if I were you, someone interested in articles I write about traveling the spiritual path, I’d want to ask this question of me: Of all these things you write about, which work best for you?

The answer is that many work for me. But…

There is one that I find helps me the most. And it is this:

Accepting and not resisting what comes my way.

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Here’s how I look at studying the macro matters of the metaphysical.

Imagine a circle. At its center is another, smaller circle.

The circle of truth

That small circle is the absolute truth of the human condition. And from several points on the bigger circle, we can draw a line to the smaller circle of truth.

What those lines represent are different ways of illuminating this same macro truth. What are some of those ways?

-Our problems/suffering in life stem from wanting things to be a certain way, AKA desire in the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. Our egos are the source of those wants. Eliminate the ego and the wants go away…and so does the suffering.

-The ego causes us to create attachments, which are the chief source of suffering. Remove the attachments and we eliminate the suffering.

-In Michael Singer’s Yoga-based teachings, we have experiences that we hold onto that become pockets of stuck energy called Samskaras. Those energies plague our lives until we let them go.

Well, there’s another paradigm through which to view the truth of human experience. It’s one that I’ve heard the great Ram Dass expound on several times. It’s captured in one word:

Separateness.

As in, most humans feel that they are a unique and separate entity traversing the Universe alone.

Eckhart’s ripple in the ocean metaphor

Eckhart Tolle uses the metaphor of the ripple in the vast ocean to illuminate the concept.

If you are a ripple cruising along the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and you think that’s all you are – just one lonely ripple fending for itself in that turbulent, immensity of water – well, that’s a scary existence of fear, contraction and anxiety.

If, on the other hand, you realize that you are not separate from, but are intimately connected to and a part of the ocean, the fear isn’t there.

As Rumi described it:

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop.”

Carrying this metaphor to we humans, if we aren’t a completely separate, lonely being/drop in the ocean, then what are we? First, we need to know, what is the ocean in our example?

The ocean equates to the consciousness of the Universe. And consciousness is consciousness. It’s all the same.

What we all get when we come into the world as form/humanness is a little slice of that universal consciousness.

[Quick digression/timeout here. My head is about to explode just writing this. If yours is, too, hang in there! This is leading somewhere.]

A slice of universal consciousness

The Hindus call that slice the Atman. And the Atman is a little slice of Brahman, the ultimate reality and supreme divine force underpinning all existence.

That slice of Universal consciousness/Atman is the essence of who we are. It is perfect, beautiful and supremely loving.

So, what the heck happened? I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel perfect, beautiful and supremely loving all the time. How come?

The roles we play

Because I, like the rest of humankind, developed this thing called an ego starting from my earliest days. I was given a name and then a bunch of roles and identities to play.

Son. Athlete. Friend. Student. Employee. Boyfriend. Husband. Dad. Brother. Writer.

We all did that in furtherance of protecting ourselves from the big, bad world. We were told, in essence:

“Be a good son and we’ll love, feed and protect you.”

“Be a good athlete and we will shower you with praise and respect.”

“Be a good employee and I’ll give you a raise and a title that will make you feel more important.”

And on and on and on.

What all of these accumulations of ego did was move us further and further away from our perfect, slice of consciousness self. They also made us feel…

Separate.

Separate from what? That Brahman/Universal consciousness that we all are at our essence.

Roles played by David Gerken

I identify as David Gerken, husband, dad, tennis player, brother, Princeton grad, writer, funny guy and obnoxious smart ass, among other roles and traits.

What I don’t identify as is the slice of consciousness that is my true self.

What I’ve just laid out here, ladies and gentlemen, is one way of describing the central predicament of humanity: We identify as the ego-created separate being and not as our true, conscious selves.

What happens when we drop our egos? We lose that sense of separateness. And what takes the place of that separateness?

My favorite spiritual being, Neem Karoli Baba (the guru of Ram Dass), said and taught very little. But one thing he was said to say often was,

“Sub ek.”

In Hindi that means “All one.”

So that’s what takes the place of separateness when we drop the ego: A sense of oneness with the Universe. This feeling of being part of everything is the opposite of separateness.

Why this confuses people

Some people get confused by this, thinking,

“We’re all one? As in, one and the same? That’s crazy. Everybody on the planet is completely unique. Even identical twins.”

Which is true. Every human is distinct and unique.

The same consciousness expressing itself through us

So, what’s the deal? The deal is that this Universal consciousness, AKA God, the Source, the Creator, wants to express itself through all of these different forms/people that it created.

That consciousness expresses itself through me, a five-foot, ten-inch male, born into a particular family, etc., etc., different than it does through a woman born in rural China who works in an Apple factory making iPhones.

It’s the same consciousness experiencing the world through all the myriad forms it has created.

Where does this all leave us? What are we to take from this one expression of the overall truth?

We’re all one

First, and most obviously, I hope you’ll take to heart that you are not alone in this big, bad world, but are intimately connected to the whole. And because most of you probably don’t feel this way, you’ll need to begin by knowing this intellectually. That’s your starting point.

How do we actually get to a place where we feel and deeply realize this notion of sub ek/all one rather than just knowing it intellectually?

That brings us to takeaway number two. And it’s a big one. In fact, it’s the biggest one of all in our spiritual journey. It’s about that little circle of truth at the center of the big circle.

You’ll remember that we drew lines from different points on the big circle to little one in the center.

Lines to the center of the circle

Those lines represented different ways of expressing the big spiritual truth in the center. Summed up, those lines were:

-We suffer because we want/desire things to be a certain way. Remove the wants and the suffering ends.

-We create attachments which cause suffering. Remove the attachments and the suffering ends.

-We have experiences that we hold onto that manifest as energies known as Samskaras. Those energies are the cause of suffering. Let them go and the suffering ends.

And now we’ve added a fourth line/path to explaining the central predicament of humankind:

-Separateness causes suffering. Remove it and the suffering ends.

All four concepts are just different ways of getting to that central truth in the middle of the circle.

The central truth

What is that central truth? You all know it by now, but I’ll spell it out as clearly as possible.

Drumroll please…

Desires/wants, attachments, Samskaras and separateness are all created by the same entity:

The ego.

As such, here’s the human journey as I see it:

-We’re born with a slice of Atman/Universal consciousness that is beautiful and perfect.

-We develop an ego early on that obscures this consciousness and makes us feel separate and fearful.

-The work of the spiritual path lies in letting go of the ego so we can resume identifying as what we’ve always been – a beautiful, conscious being.

Final thoughts

After several years of studying, analyzing and traveling the spiritual path, that’s what I’ve come up with.

Who would’ve thought that Elsa, an animated character in Frozen, had the ultimate answer all along:

“Let it go!”

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I know I sound like a broken record on this ‘letting go’ thing. And I don’t apologize for it. Because letting go is the central activity required for liberation.

Put another way. When my wife and any of her friends ask me for advice about tennis – I’ve played since I was eight and was a four-year varsity letterman at Princeton – I tell them, again and again, that job number one is to be loose. Be fluid. That is central to playing good tennis.

The point is that the fundamentals of any endeavor – writing, piano, golf – need to be stressed, over and over and over, in furtherance of mastering said endeavor.

Letting go leads to liberation

Well, no endeavor is more important and yields more benefit than liberating ourselves from ourselves. And, as Michael Singer teaches, the root of liberation lies in letting go.

Why is that so? You’ve heard it before, but here it is again.

Starting in our youngest years, we had experiences that we either really liked, so we clung to them and want them to repeat, or, much more common, really didn’t like, so we resisted them, thinking that would protect us. In both of those scenarios, we held onto those experiences.

That holding on manifests inside as energy. Stuck energy, unfortunately. Because that stuck energy, which collectively comprises the ego, runs and ruins our lives. How?

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The impetus for writing this came the other day in a two-hour conversation with my great friend and spiritual confidant Nick Winger, a close approximation of his name (and no, it wasn’t Mickey Singer).

We went deep, covering everything from what consciousness is, what the Universe wants to achieve through we mortal beings, what role will plays in all of this, and several other topics I can’t remember because two hours in my head exploded!

The biggest revelation for me came in the way we start this story of the spiritual journey. To a person, every teacher I’ve come across focuses exclusively on the spiritual and, to some extent, the psychological in outlining the path. Makes sense, right?

Well, I’m a pragmatist who feels compelled to examine everything from every side. And one side I rarely see addressed, if ever, by the spiritual luminaries is the physical realm.

What do I mean by physical realm? The nuts and bolts of what we’re born with. And by nuts and bolts, I mostly mean genes.

Evolution and the spiritual journey

All of our genes have been affected by literally millions of years of evolution. And the key thing to remember about evolution is its central point: All living creatures evolve in furtherance of one objective – propagation of their genes. Which means ensuring that some part of us lives on after we die. That’s what it’s all about.

So if a brown lizard species in the Amazon keeps getting gobbled up because it’s easily seen by its prey, that lizard will evolve over thousands of years into a green color that makes it safer because it blends in with the surrounding greenery. Again, to propagate its genes.

For our purposes, we’re interested in how humans evolved, specifically our brains. First in the animal world and then in humans, we developed these things called amygdalae – I use the plural because we have two amygdala, one in each brain hemisphere. In animals and humans, their purpose was to keep us on high alert when danger arose.

Our amygdalae rule us

So, 80,000 years ago, when one of our homo sapiens ancestors came upon a saber-toothed tiger, his amygdalae rushed chemicals throughout his body telling him to run like hell. Again, for the foundational, evolutionary purpose of propagating his genes.

Unfortunately for us, evolution acts at a snail’s pace, to the point that the brain of that 80,000-year-old ancestor of ours is virtually the same as yours and mine. And because the world has changed so much, (there was no iPhone, TikTok or Instagram 80,000 years ago!) our brains are completely discombobulated.

Here’s but one example to illustrate. Let’s say you get a call telling you you’ve been fired, as happened to me many years ago when the TV show The West Wing let me go.

For most people, the response is similar to that ancestor who just encountered the hungry tiger. It’s the amygdalae shooting chemicals galore making us feel like we’re about to die. Which, of course, isn’t true. But our brains think it is…because our brains’ evolution hasn’t caught up to our relatively new reality.

The prefrontal cortex to the rescue

The good news is that evolution did something starting many thousands of years ago to counteract some of the irrational nuttiness of the amygdalae. It created the prefrontal cortex (PFC).

The PFC, located just behind the forehead, is the most recent and advanced anatomical brain structure. It is considered the “personality center” and “executive hub,” responsible for complex behaviors including decision-making, planning, personality expression, and moderating social behavior.

I call the PFC the “cool cucumber.” Why? Because it moderates our “worry wart” amygdalae.

The snake that’s a garden hose

How does that work? Here’s an example Michael Singer uses.

Let’s say you see a coiled up garden hose in someone’s garden. At first, you freak out, thinking it’s a coiled up snake. Your amygdalae shoot adrenaline to every corner of your body and put you on high alert.

But after a moment or two, your PFC enters the picture, takes a closer look at the hose and determines that it’s…a hose. You then calm down and move on.

So the ideal situation for us would be to have a large, thick PFC and smaller, less active amygdalae.

I would bet my bottom dollar that the self-realized gurus from India had massive PFCs and tiny amygdalae.

Now many of you might be thinking,

“This is cool how the brain works and all, but I was born with a certain size and strength PFC and amygdalae, so why should this even matter to me?”

That leads us to what this all means for you and your spiritual journey. The bottom line: We humans have the ability to physically alter our PFC and amygdalae.

And that is a hugely important part of our spiritual journey.

How do we do that? Spiritual practices.

Huh?

Scientific studies on meditation and mindfulness

Several studies, including these two from Harvard and the University of Messina in Italy, show that practicing regular meditation and mindfulness physically enlarges the PFC and decreases both the size and activity of the amygdalae.

It’s all possible because of something called neuroplasticity, the brain’s lifelong ability to reorganize its structure, functions, or connections in response to internal or external stimuli, such as learning, experience, or injury.

For an example of how this works, look no further than my firing from the writing staff of The West Wing, which happened a decade before I started practicing regular meditation and mindfulness.

When I got that phone call from my agent, my head immediately started pumping all kinds of chemicals through my body. They made my whole being feel heavier. Depressed.

Somewhere deep in my psyche, I felt like I was dying. Not in the forefront of my consciousness, but deep down somewhere.

Cut to, as we used to say in Hollywood, twelve years later after several years of regular meditation and mindfulness practice. How did I face brutal Hollywood smackdowns then?

Paris Letdown with no Meltdown

Let’s start with Expats, a pilot script I wrote that Amazon Studios bought from me. It was about four single Americans, two men and two women, all around thirty years old, living and working in Paris, who bond over their shared experience of navigating life as Americans in the City of Lights. It was my version of Sex and the City, set in Paris.

If it got the final green light, the show was going to be filmed in Paris, my favorite city on the planet. This was wildest-dream-come-true territory for me as my wife and I lived in Paris for two months after we got married.

So I work my tail off for months. Turn in the final draft and…I wait. And I wait…

Months later I get the word: No go.

So, how did I handle being told that my dream of producing MY OWN show in Paris was dead? I wasn’t happy about it. There was a deep sense of loss.

But I didn’t get those depression chemicals pumping into my head as I did with The West Wing firing. My head didn’t become heavy and foggy. In other words, I didn’t have that awful, physical reaction inside my head.

Rough Ride with Teddy Roosevelt

A similar scenario occurred a few years later when I wrote a screenplay about Teddy Roosevelt, my favorite president. I sold the script to a production company funded by the billionaire founder of Ameritrade. We went out to Kevin Costner, Michael Keaton and some big-time directors and all seemed groovy.

But alas, another passion project bit the dust. Again, I wasn’t happy about it. But again, no depression chemicals saturating my brain. No horrible thoughts racing around my head. Just some normal sadness that my Teddy Roosevelt project wouldn’t be coming to a theater near you.

Bottom line: I think it’s safe to say that for most of my life I had an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex and fierce and active amygdalae. So when I got fired from The West Wing, my prefrontal cortex wasn’t strong enough to override the total freak out that my amygdala was perpetrating on my entire being.

The takeaway

The main takeaway is for you to become aware of the physical aspect of your spiritual journey.

And to know that doing practices like meditation, mindfulness and others results in physical changes to your brain that make you less anxious and fearful. In other words, these practices make us calmer, clearer and more present.

My hope is that knowing the practical, scientific aspect of the spiritual journey will provide extra incentive for you to get rolling on a meditation and mindfulness practice.

When I finally get off my lazy keester, I’m going to write a book that will help you do just that.

Any comments, the harsher the better, to guilt me into getting the book going would be welcomed and appreciated…

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This article will be particularly impactful for any of you who place yourselves on the sensitive end of the sensitivity spectrum. I imagine that’s a goodly sum of you as we peeps interested in the spiritual tend to be on the sensitive side.

The story starts years ago when I heard my favorite spiritual teacher, Michael Singer, say something in one of his talks that made my ears prick up. In subsequent talks over the years, Singer said it again. And again. And again.

So why am I just getting around to writing about this now rather than years ago? I should have. Mea culpa.

Well, better late than never, so let’s giddy up to the meat of the matter.

I’ll start by asking: Do you ‘take things personally’ on a regular basis? What do I mean by ‘take things personally’? I think you know but here are a couple of examples to illustrate.

-You’re talking with an acquaintance at a cocktail party when they abruptly bolt from you to talk with someone “more important.” You take it personally.

-Your spouse says you’ve been slacking off on the household upkeep. You take it personally.

-Your surly teenage daughter says the jeans you’re wearing look terrible on you. You take it personally.

Taking these perceived slights personally manifests in different ways for different people but usually includes some kind of physical jolt or pang inside. I feel that jolt in my stomach.

That brings us to the teaching du jour, Singer’s two-word gem of wisdom:

“Nothing’s personal.”

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For most of us, life is a series of ebbing and flowing moods. We’re in a good mood then something happens that puts us in a bad mood or vice-versa.

The point of this piece is to get people to take a fresh look at those cycles and then work on minimizing the bad moods. First, let’s take a look at what causes our bad moods.

Obviously, thousands of factors could come into play. Many are dictated by the lives we lead. A single mom with three kids in diapers will have different mood shapers than an unemployed, twenty-something college grad living rent-free in his parents’ basement.

An Instagram-induced funk

The babysitter calling in sick five minutes before mom is supposed to leave for work throws her day into the toilet pretty quick. For the twenty-something guy it could be seeing an Instagram post of a college buddy of his out celebrating the cool new job he just got…as he sits on the couch bobbing his eyes between Instagram and the World Series of Poker on ESPN.

Second would be moods determined by our general makeup. Some people come out of the womb with a relatively sunny disposition while others, not so much. Everybody else falls somewhere in between. So a flat tire might ruin an entire day for somebody while the sunny type will roll with it like water off a duck’s back.

The random bad mood

Finally, some mornings we roll out of bed and feel great, or lousy, for seemingly no reason at all. It’s random.

This is in keeping with the mood cycling dynamic that seems to be part of most people’s lives. We go up…and down…and all around.

Which frustrates a lot of people, myself included. We do well for a day or two then hit a bad mood patch. Why can’t we just stay in that good mood mode?

Buddhism and impermanence

The Buddhists are all over this one with their concept of impermanence. All that means is that life is constantly changing. Things never stay exactly the same from even one moment to the next. Sometimes that constant change puts us in a good mood while other times it puts us in a bad mood.

Fine, so we all constantly experience ups and downs, for many different reasons. I’m going to focus on how we can shorten, or even stave off, the down moods. I’ll use an example from my life to illustrate.

Gerken family morning mayhem

Mornings at my home are typically chaotic as my wife and I navigate getting our 17, 15 and 9 year old kids out the door to school. Lunches need to be made, breakfasts served, clothes put on, teeth brushed, etc. Sometimes, in the midst of this mayhem, major meltdowns occur.

Like when my daughter has something in mind she wants to wear but can’t find it. As takeoff time inches closer my wife slowly but surely loses it. “Let’s go! It’s 8:25. We have to leave!” “But I can’t find my sweater!” “I don’t care! Wear another sweater!” “No!” “We have to go! It’s not fair to make your sister late.”

Then comes the inevitable barging into my office — “You have to take her. I can’t wait,” followed by the also inevitable SLAMMED door. I then burst out of my office, track down my wayward daughter and get her butt moving. This often ends with my wife and me yelling at each other.

Fiasco completed.

It’s what we do AFTER the explosion that matters

The point of all this is about what happens AFTER the explosion. With frayed nerves and a pounding heart the tendency is to go into shutdown mode. This is where we throw in the towel and essentially say to ourselves,

“Screw it. Screw the world. Screw everybody. I’m going to be in a bad mood now…”

In other words, some triggering event leads us to throw in the towel and board the plane to Bad Mood Island.

The central problem is that giving up like this often results in our bad mood infecting the rest of the day. It’s not a conscious decision where we actually say to ourselves,

“Okay, I’m going to be in a bad mood for the rest of the day.”

But that’s the effect. This has happened to me far too many times and I’ll bet it’s happened to many of you as well.

So what’s the mindful way of tackling these bad mood situations? In the example with my daughter where the whole household has erupted and I’m finally back in my office trying to get to work, what should I do?

The mindful solution

The answer, as it is with all things mindfulness related, is simple. I stop. Close my eyes. Take at least five deep breaths and get centered. I relax as best I can. Then I lean away and observe what I’m feeling, from a place of nonjudgment.

In this example, I’d say to myself:

“I just got all bent out of shape because daughter went nuts over missing her sweater, then wife screamed at me because she was stressed about getting out the door. Okay, so that’s what is. Life goes on.”

The key is how we end this inner monologue. We say,

“I am not going to let this ruin my mood. I’m going to let it go and move on with my day.”

Don’t expect that this inner pep talk is going to make you feel okay right afterward. That’s not the objective.

The objective is to nip a bad mood in the bud.

It is to stop yourself from going down the rabbit hole of stewing about what just happened, which only serves to feed that bad mood the egoic poison it so craves.

If you’re in a bad mood for no identifiable reason, you do the same thing. You may have just woken up and you feel off. So you take some breaths, lean away and observe how you feel. We don’t complain about it or judge it in any way. We simply observe it. Then we say:

“I feel kind of lousy. Not sure why. But that’s what is. Let’s see how things go.”

What we don’t do is wake up, feel lousy, and say:

“I’m in a lousy mood and I feel like crap. Boy this day is gonna suck.”

By the way, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do the myriad things we can do to get ourselves out of a bad mood. By all means, get some exercise, call a friend or do whatever else helps.

The key is NOT punting on your day

The key to this whole idea is that it seems so many of us get in a bad mood, caused by any number of factors, and then we just punt. We throw in the towel and capitulate to a long bout of bad mood-dom. Well, guess what?

It doesn’t have to be that way!

We have a choice. We can choose to punt our day away or we can exert a modicum of mindfulness into the situation to nip the bad mood in the bud.

The best cost-benefit deal of all time

The cost of doing this is minuscule. It’s maybe a minute of calming down, getting centered, letting go and then moving on with your day.

The benefit is that you don’t allow the rest of your day to go down the tubes. And that’s just for the one-time example.

Think of how much it would help our lives to practice this on a regular basis. Let’s say you saved yourself from being in a bad mood two times a week. That’s over 100 bad moods per year you’re averting. For five years. Ten years. Thirty years. That’s a ton of bad vibes not being released into the world.

All for the price of breathing, relaxing and then sticking up for your well-being by refusing to let your mood go south because of whatever just happened.

That’s a great deal for us.

And an even better deal for the world.

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This piece isn’t about guiding your kid through the college admission insanity we’ve all heard about. Enough has been written about that.

What it’s about is three basic life lessons I’ve tried to teach my son, starting roughly two years ago when all the college mania started. Those lessons can help any of you at any stage of life, which is the only reason I’m writing this.

Before getting to those lessons, I need to describe the frenzied college admission process that has infected America’s teens and their parents the past few decades.

What does that look like?

-Kids having anxiety attacks before and during taking the SAT or ACT tests.

-Kids fretting that if they don’t get into their college of choice, or at least a “good” college (whatever that means), their life will be one slow roll to homelessness.

-Parents fretting that if their teen doesn’t get into their college of choice, or at least a “good” college, their kid’s life will be one slow roll to homelessness.

-Parents spinning up other parents about everything from which schools junior is applying to, to which schools junior got into to what junior’s GPA is and what his tests scores are and...yada, yada, yada, in the inestimable words of Jerry Seinfeld.

Pardon my French, but it is, and has been for many years now, an unmitigated shit show. As the youngest of six, I witnessed it time after time with my eleven nieces and nephews, all several years older than my kids.

I promised myself that I’d at least try to make my kids’ experience a healthier one. And now that my oldest child’s admissions journey is over, he committed to the University of Washington last week, I think I succeeded. Here’s how.

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First, an apology. I’ve written over 500 articles on all manner of spiritual topics but have yet to tackle arguably the most important concept of all.

What is this super-important concept? It can be described in one word, which I’ll get to.

Before doing so, we need to summarize the path to liberation, as taught by my f…

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Artists come in all shapes and sizes. They paint, sculpt, etch, draw, write, dance, act, sing, play the guitar and so on.

According to Eckhart Tolle, the ones that create sublime work have something in common. He puts it like this:

“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.”

My 17 years as a Hollywood screenwriter confirmed Eckhart’s assertion. The best stuff I wrote came when I quieted down and just listened.

Writing dialogue in Hollywood

This was especially true when writing dialogue. I wouldn’t think to myself, “Okay, now what would she say?” I’d just sit in my chair, close my eyes, envision the character and then wait to hear what they said.

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Two weeks ago I wrote about why judging others is all bad, no good.

Today, I’m writing about judging’s first cousin: Comparing.

Now I know only a few reading this can relate to comparing yourselves to others and that the vast majority of you have never done so, but please bear with me…

THAT WAS A JOKE!

We all compare

Of the eight billion human beings on Eart…

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Letting go is the be-all, end-all of spiritual growth. For those of you counting, that’s the 3,478^th time I’ve written that. I hope you’ll agree that something so important bears repeating…a lot.

What I mean by letting go is releasing all of the emotional baggage we’ve accumulated and held onto over the course of our lives.

Why is that so consequential? Because if we don’t let it go, that baggage just sits there and runs, and ruins, our lives. Not even thousands of hours of meditation will change that.

You might be wondering why ‘letting go’ doesn’t appear in the title. That this article is supposed to be about dealing with becoming upset.

Answer: By definition, if something is upsetting you, it’s poking your baggage…and that baggage needs to be tossed out of the airplane, AKA let go.

That being the case, I’m always on the lookout for eloquent, impactful descriptions of this letting go process. My favorite might be one I recently heard Michael Singer talk about.

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We do it so much. And we don’t even realize it.

Do what?

Judge people. Off and on, all day. Every day.

What do I mean by judging?

Let’s say you meet someone at a dinner party. On the way home you and your spouse dish:

“I liked her, but I’m not sure. Part of me thinks she’s really cool, but part of me thinks she coul…

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I think it’s safe to say that most people who lean toward the spiritual are on the upper end of the sensitivity scale. Why?

Try this on for size. Sensitivity often leads to emotional pain which leads to suffering which leads to seeking relief from suffering which leads to looking to the spiritual for answers.

Yes? No? Maybe?

Good sensitivity

Healthy sensitivity is great. It allows us to go deeper in relationships, romantic and otherwise, and experience a richer life than, as Paul Simon famously sang, a rock that feels no pain, and an island that never cries.

Then of course there’s unhealthy sensitivity. That’s the kind where our emotions run us…often into the ground.

One way this unhealthy sensitivity manifests can be expressed in a phrase all of you are familiar with: People pleaser.

You know any of those? Might you be one?

These are people who go out of their way to make sure everybody is doing okay. How so?

- A guy asks you out on a date and suggests the hot new steakhouse in town. You tell him that sounds great…even though you’re a vegetarian.

- You have a cocktail party at your house and dart all over the place, sick to your stomach thinking that somebody may not be having the time of their life.

- You bite your tongue, yet again, at the latest lousy remark lobbed your way by your mother-in-law, knowing that creating a fuss might upset your spouse.

These are all examples of the people pleaser in action.

Self-abandonment

And what can we call this behavior? Abandoning oneself.

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Most of what I do is clarify spiritual concepts in a way that regular people like us can understand them. After all, what good is any of this stuff if it flies right over our heads?

I’m excited about today’s clarification. Why? Because it’s about truly understanding how great things can be in our lives. Here’s how.

It start…

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One thing I’ve found in my fifteen years of studying all things spiritual is that the simple is always the most profound. Things like—

-Follow your breathing.

-Relax and then respond.

-The key to happiness is not wanting a lot.

All of these things are so simple and if we devote ourselves to practicing them, contentment is ours.

Powerful wisdom is simple but difficult to practice

The problem? Simple doesn’t mean easy. Our minds are so powerful and busy that they make doing all three of those things difficult for even the most equanimous among us.

C’est la vie.

Why do I bring up this simplicity idea? Because today’s teaching is also uber simple and uber profound.

Tinkering with a few words

All it is is playing with a couple of words. Here’s how it works.

Most people, when they feel down in the dumps about something, will say to themselves,

“I’m sad.”

A brilliant, yet simple, teaching from Michael Singer suggests saying instead,

“I’m feeling sadness.”

What’s the big deal, you might ask? Just add a word?

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Here we go again, gang. Time for another exploration of that pesky voice in our head that refuses to shut up.

If you’re wondering why I write about this topic, it’s because understanding it is essential for our overall well-being and advancement on the spiritual path. Why? Because that voice, and our succumbing to …

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Here goes another in a long line of articles about using life experiences to goose our growth. This one comes from a few days ago when I came to a four way stop sign intersection right near my home.

I put on my blinker to turn left. A car coming the other way got there a second or two before me and drove through the intersection.

I then proceeded to start my left turn but stopped when I saw that the car behind the last one started going through the intersection. That car had clearly gotten there well after I did but barreled through anyway.

I’m sure this has happened to all of us in our driving careers.

A righteous car crash

But it occurred to me: What if I had just continued in my left turn and resolved that I was going to keep going no matter what? In which case the other car would either stop and let me through or we’d crash.

I’d clearly gotten to the intersection first. And if we crashed? Well, I would be in the right and they would be in the wrong…

And I’d have a smashed up car.

What the heck does anything of this have to do with you? How in the heck could this anecdote possibly be helpful?

Here’s how.

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