So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for listening.
And thank you for being here.
At some point you asked for something.
And I do not mean vaguely.
I mean the real kind.
The kind that happens at 3 in the morning.
Or in a hospital corridor.
Or in a car outside a house you did not want to go back into.
It was very specific.
You named the thing.
And some of the name terms,
I will be better,
I will do this differently,
I will never ask for anything again.
And you meant every word at that time.
Which is the part that stays with you.
And whatever you were asking,
Whoever you thought you were asking,
The answer was no.
Now a word about language before we go any further.
Because I do not want anybody standing outside this talk on a technicality.
I am not going to use the word God because it is the word I reach for and it is shorter than alternatives.
I am going to use the word God,
My apologies,
Because it is the word I reach for and it is shorter than the alternatives.
Swap it for whatever is true for you.
Call it universe,
Call it fate,
Call it life,
Call it nothing at all.
Everything I'm going to say works if you believe there is something bigger than your present.
And that's enough.
And it works if you believe there's nobody there.
And you were talking to yourself in the car park.
Which is also a real and dignified thing that human beings do.
And I want to be clear about what I am,
Because it matters for how you take this.
I am not a teacher for any of this and I have no standing on large questions and I have not resolved them myself.
I sit with people for a living and I,
Through my own experiences,
Have had my own version.
Of what I'm describing and what follows is where I got to.
So it is a view,
It is a lens and you are absolutely entitled to a different one and there's no arguments.
What I want to talk about is what happens to a person after the answer is no.
Because that is the part nobody prepares you for.
And it is a great deal more common than we admit.
So let me describe what happens clinically because it has a shape and almost nobody is told that it has a shape.
First,
There is the asking itself.
And there is a name for it.
It's bargaining.
And it shows up in almost every account of how many people meet catastrophe in their lives.
And it is not stupid or childish.
It is what a mind does when it encounters something it cannot accept and cannot change.
Anything that might still be an exchange.
If I do this,
Then perhaps.
.
.
And what strikes me is how private it is.
Almost nobody tells anybody what they've offered because there is an embarrassment in it afterwards.
Then the answer comes or does not come.
And then something else begin.
There is a body of research on what gets called spiritual struggle.
What happens to people who go through something terrible and find their sense of divine damaged by it?
And the findings are quite clear on one point in particular.
It is not the doubt that does the harm.
Doubt is survivable and questioning is often productive.
What is consistently associated with worse outcomes is the specific belief that you have been punished or singled out or abandoned.
Feeling forsaken predicts poorer recovery,
More depression,
Worse physical health.
And more reliably than losing your faith,
Outright voodoo.
Which means the dangerous thought is not there's nobody there.
The dangerous thought is,
There's somebody there and they did this to me.
Or they watched and did nothing.
And I have found that people carry the second one for decades without ever saying it out loud.
The other thing that happens is one nobody names as a loss.
And I think it's a mistake.
If your faith went in that period.
And mine wobbled badly enough that I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
That is a bereavement.
You did not just lose an opinion about the universe.
You actually lost a structure.
Something that told you what things meant,
That made the world coherent for you and that gave you somewhere to put your unbearables.
And nobody brings a casserole for that.
There's no funeral.
Nobody rings you the following week.
And you are expected to be quietly relived to have grown out of it.
So a lot of people grieve that entirely alone.
On top of grieving the original thing.
Two losses and one of them is unrecognized.
So here is where I got to,
Eventually.
And I want to say plainly that it took years and I did not arrive at it cleverly.
I said it out loud to somebody recently.
And to be honest,
I do not entirely know where it came from.
It was in a session with somebody and the words just came.
It is not God's job to perfect your life.
It is God's job to perfect you.
I'll say this again,
It is not God's job to perfect your life.
It is God's job to perfect you.
And when I heard myself say it,
I understood what had been bothering me for a long time about my own asking.
Everything I ever asked for was circumstantial.
Change this,
Remove that,
Let this person be alright,
Let this not be happening.
Every single request was about the arrangement of the world outside me to suit me or to take my pain away.
I had never once asked to be made equal to it.
And I'm not saying that as a.
.
.
As an insult to anybody,
To you or to myself.
It is entirely natural.
That when something is crushing you,
Of course you ask for it to stop.
Anyone would.
I would do it again tomorrow.
But it left me with a picture in which the Divine was essentially a mechanism for adjusting circumstances.
And if the circumstances did not adjust,
The mechanism was broken or absent or indifferent.
Or angry at me or punishing me.
And that is a very thin picture.
It is also I've come to think.
Not what any serious tradition ever actually claimed.
Substitute your own word.
It is not life's job to arrange itself around you.
It is not the job of the universe to give you the outcome.
And if something is happening to you and the question of what it is making of you is a live one,
Whether or not anybody is behind it.
Now the clinical version of the same idea,
Because this is where it stops being a nice sentence and it becomes something with evidence behind it.
Psychologists distinguish two ways of exerting control.
First is the obvious one.
You change your circumstances to fit you.
You solve the problem.
You leave the job.
You end the relationship.
You get the treatment.
And this is the one our whole culture is built on.
And it is very frequently the right answer.
And the second one we barely have language for.
You change yourself to fit the circumstances.
You adjust your expectations,
Your interpretation,
Your goals.
And you become someone the situation is survivable for.
And for a long time,
Psychology treated that second one as a poor relation.
Giving up.
Being passive.
But what research has found instead is more interesting.
That when the first kind of control is genuinely available,
Use it.
Always.
But when it is genuinely not available,
People who can shift into the second kind.
Do better than people who keep hammering the first.
Hammering out the first.
And not just emotionally,
Better health outcomes,
Lesser depression,
Better adjustment in serious illness,
In the situations that do not have solutions.
And people who cannot make that shift.
Who keep pushing at something immovable are the ones who deter it.
So the sentence I stumbled into has a clinical shape.
Asking for your life to be perfected is the first kind of control and being perfected is the second.
And when the first is off the table,
The second is not a consolation prize.
It is an intervention.
And this is not new,
Obviously.
Your body,
Your reputation,
Other people,
The outcome of events which are not up to you,
Your judgment,
Your response,
What you do next is up to you.
1900 years before anybody ran a study and it is the same finding.
And I like that convergence because it suggests that we are not discovering something,
We are remembering it.
Now the harder part,
Which is inevitability.
And I hold this one loosely.
There is an idea that I grew up around that I really did not appreciate until much later.
In the Indian traditions.
The workings of a consequence are not treated as one undifferentiated thing.
There are distinctions.
And one of them is a category of consequence that is already in motion.
The portion that has been set going and cannot now be recalled.
And the image used for it as an arrow that has left the bow.
You have choices about a great deal of things.
But you do not have a choice about the arrow in the fight.
That one is going to land.
And the only question available to you is how do you meet it?
And whatever you make of the metaphysics,
And I make less of it than my grandparents would have,
I think that is psychologically exact.
Some things in a human life are simply going to happen.
Your parents are going to die unless something worse happens first.
Bodies fail,
People leave.
Some proportion of what is coming for you is already on its way and no amount of goodness or vigilance or even prayer will turn it around.
And that sounds bleak,
Said quickly.
I have found it enormously relieving.
And I think the relief comes from what it removes.
It removes the question that eats people alive.
That what did I do to cause this?
Now this brings me to a word that has been thoroughly mangled and that I have some personal claim to be annoyed about.
Now.
.
.
Karma?
In Ordinary English Somebody behaves badly,
Something bad happens to them,
And we say,
Oh,
That's karma.
And that is close to the opposite of what the word says.
Carries in the traditions it comes from.
The root of it simply means action.
So it is a teaching about consequence and momentum.
That what you do sets things in motion and the emphasis in the actual text falls overwhelmingly on your conduct now rather than on a ledger of deserts.
And the popular version is not just inaccurate,
It is extremely harmful also.
And there is research exactly on this.
Human beings have a strong tendency to believe the world is fundamentally fair.
People get what they deserve.
It is a very comforting belief and it does something useful.
Which is to make the world feel predictable and effort feel less worthwhile.
Now here is the vicious side which is well documented when something terrible happens to someone.
The fair world belief has two options.
Either the world is not fair or they must have done something.
And people reach for the second with remarkable frequency.
And this is the part that matters about themselves.
So you get the person who has been through something appalling,
Asking what they did to deserve it,
Not out of humility.
Because their mind is protecting the idea that the world makes sense.
And is prepared to convict them to do it.
Any framework,
Karma,
Sin,
The law of attraction,
Manifesting,
You take your pick,
That gets used to explain why somebody deserved what happened to them,
Has stopped being a spiritual teaching and has just become a machine for producing shame.
So I would let all of that go.
Not the idea that actions have consequences,
Which is obviously true.
But the ledger.
The idea that you're suffering was itemized and issued.
Now I want to tell you something I find genuinely consoling.
And I am going to put a fence around it first because it is the kind of thought that helps enormously when you arrive at it yourself.
And wounds very badly when somebody hands it to you.
So this is mine,
My lived experience.
This is not a teaching.
Please do not say to anybody else who is in the middle of any suffering.
So,
Here it is.
When I look back at the worst of it.
I notice that I did not receive the whole of what was coming.
There were points where it could have gone considerably further and it did not.
There were places where something held.
I could not tell you what that was.
A person happened to ring.
A decision I made for no reason I can reconstruct.
A timing that I have no explanation for.
And the thought I keep is,
Perhaps what I got was the survivable version.
Perhaps the hand was not removed.
Perhaps it was on my back the whole way through.
And what it did was not prevent the thing but to moderate it.
So that I went through something that took me apart and in the end it did not,
In the end it did not destroy me.
Now,
I have no evidence for this.
It is not a claim.
It is a reading and I have chosen it because it is the reading I can live inside.
And the clinical footnote,
Since I would rather be honest than mystical,
What I have just described also has a name.
Imagining how something might have gone worse.
And the research on it is mixed.
When it arises from the inside,
It tends to reduce distress.
When it is supplied in a book,
It tends to increase it.
Because the person hearing it feels unmet and corrected.
Which is exactly why I fenced it.
That it is a thought to arrive at,
In your own time,
If at all it happens for you.
And your truth may be completely different from this,
That can happen too.
And it may be that nothing held and there was nobody there.
And I've simply constructed something now that lets me carry it.
And I am genuinely at peace with that possibility.
It is still the reading that I keep.
So one thing that has been steadying for me and I offer it because I think most people do not know it.
The traditions are much more honest about unanswered prayers than the modern spiritual marketplaces.
Roughly a third of the Psalms are complaints.
They are not gratitude or praise,
They are complaints.
People saying in writing,
Preserved for 3,
000 years,
That they have been abandoned and they want to know why.
And that material was kept.
Nobody edited it out for being off message.
The book of Job is an entire text built around the refusal to give a tidy answer.
So Jobs' friends arrive with explanations.
You must have done something.
There must be a reason.
And the text treats them as wrong.
And when the answer finally comes,
It is not a reason at all.
It is a series of questions about the natural world,
Which is to say,
You are asking a question that is the wrong size.
And in the Christian account,
The night before the worst of it.
The request is made explicitly.
Let this pass.
If it is possible,
Take it away.
The answer is no and the asking was kept in the story.
I find that extraordinary.
So whatever you believe,
Notice what a tradition is doing when it preserves its own central figure,
Asking to be let off and not being let off.
It is telling you that the request is legitimate and the answer may still be no.
And both of those things can be true without anything being broken.
What was granted in that account was not the removal,
It was the capacity to go through it.
Which is more or less the sentence I started with.
So.
.
.
Now,
Let us do something with this rather than only think about it.
And I want to say what this is not.
We are not going to reframe your suffering.
Nothing that happened to you is going to be turned into a lesson tonight.
And if anything in you braces at that suggestion,
It has the right to do so.
So.
.
.
Settle now,
However you are.
Eyes open or closed.
And now let your eyes travel the room.
The corners,
The lights and the edges.
And put your feet on the floor.
Or on the bed or on the mat or in the car,
Wherever.
And the hard surface on which your body is being held.
And life your breath.
Now bring to mind the thing you asked for.
Not the whole story,
Just the request.
The specific thing that you wanted.
And notice what the body does with it,
Even now.
Even years later.
Some of you might find something very old there.
And that is alright.
We are not going to go into it.
We are only acknowledging that you asked.
And that it mattered enough to us.
Now,
This is the part that you may not have done before.
We are just going to say what happened plainly.
And you can do it out loud as well if you want.
Whatever feels right for you.
I ask for that.
I did not get it.
I ask for that.
I did not get it.
I have not forgiven that.
Not yet.
I have not forgiven that.
Not yet.
Now nothing needs to be resolved tonight.
Some of you will carry that for the rest of your lives and you still live well.
Those are not in conflict.
Now very gently.
Let's ask a different question.
And take your time because this one might be unfamiliar.
What did you become?
What did you become?
Not what did you learn,
Not what was the silver lining.
I am not asking that and I would not.
What are you now that you were not before?
What are you now?
That you were not before.
Some of it will be good.
You may be guarded,
Slewer to trust.
And tired in a way you were not.
And some of it you may be harder to frighten.
You may be much better now with challenges.
You may be much better with people in trouble.
You may have lost interest in things that used to bother you enormously because you know the things that really matter now.
So let's keep both today with us.
Let both be true.
Please don't tidy it into a story with a good ending.
Let both be true.
We will do one last thing.
And this is a new kind of asking.
Now whatever you are addressing,
A God,
Or nothing or the room.
Try asking for something different from what you asked for before.
Not for the circumstance to change,
But for capacity.
Something with this shape.
Make me equal to it.
Whatever is coming.
And whatever is already here.
Make me equal to it.
Whatever is coming.
And whatever is already here.
And just notice how different that feels in the body than the other kind of asking.
The first has a clench in it.
Bargaining always does.
And this one usually does not.
It tends to land somewhere lower and steadier.
And you might notice your shoulders drop when you say it,
Which is not mystical at all.
It is just what happens when you stop pushing at something immovable.
Now let it all go.
Feet on the floor,
Hips on the chair,
Attention behind your eyes.
And back to your breath.
Now a few things offered as one person's view on their lived experience.
Nothing more.
You are allowed to be angry about it.
Whatever you believe or do not believe,
There is a long dignified tradition of complaint and you are within it.
Anyone who tells you that anger is a spiritual failure has not read their own inner world.
The second.
If your faith went.
And nobody ever acknowledged that as a loss.
Please let yourself count it.
That was a structure for you that held things and it's gone now.
And grieving it is not a sign that you secretly want it back.
It's accurate.
And the third Change what can be changed.
And I want to be very firm about this,
Because everything I've said tonight could be misused as an argument for passivity.
And it is not one.
If the situation can be altered,
Alter it.
Leave,
Ask,
Apply,
Treat,
Decide,
Whatever.
The second kind of control is for when the first is not available.
And a great many people conclude too early that theirs is.
And notice what you've been asking for now.
Almost everybody.
When they check.
They find that every request they've ever made was about circumstances.
Try the other kind and see how that fits.
Make me equal to it.
Just to finish off,
Do not let anybody explain your suffering to you.
Not with karma,
Not with sin,
Not with lessons,
Not with the universe.
If somebody offers you a reason for what happened,
You may thank them and put it down.
I have not resolved any of this by the way.
I just want to be honest about that as we finish.
I don't even know whether anybody was listening.
I do not know whether what held me was a hand or a coincidence.
And I have made my peace not knowing,
Which took considerably longer than deciding would have.
What I do know is that I asked for my life to be fixed and it wasn't.
And that something else happened instead.
And that I would now not rate the person I became to get back the person who was asking.
This is not a happy ending.
It is not an ending at all.
It is just where I've gotten to.
So,
On that note.
.
.
Thank you very much for listening.
Thank you for joining me today.
Go gently.
Namaste
