Letting Go Of Control

When we try and control life, we suffer. Control is exhausting and leaves us feeling afraid of life. Life is vast. Life rotates planets around the sun. When we go with the flow of life, we relax. We feel connected with life itself.

Transcript

Hi,

It's Brooks.

Thank you for joining me.

Today I would like to talk about control.

And by control I'm talking about controlling life as a whole.

And I bring it up because my feeling is it can be very exhausting.

We have this feeling somehow within us sometimes that we feel like I can control life.

I want to control life.

Because basically we don't want to get hurt.

So the idea is that if I can control life I can avoid getting hurt.

And that makes sense as an idea right?

Because it's like alright if I can protect myself I want to do that.

But this feeling of controlling life it can actually bring us a lot of suffering.

Because life is vast.

Life is bigger than we could ever understand.

Life is,

I mean life rotates planets around the Sun.

It's immense.

And I actually feel that it's a lot easier to go with the flow of life.

And we've all heard that,

Go with the flow.

Just go with the flow.

But I think essentially underneath that all is life has its life does what it does.

And when we try to stop it's like trying to stop a tidal wave.

I had a client once who told me that he had a car that he was working on.

And he,

The car somehow or another slipped into gear.

Well he had the engine on.

He was working on the engine.

And somehow or another the car slipped into gear and started moving forward.

And what he did was he put his shoulder into the front of the car to try to stop the car.

I mean that was his automatic reaction.

And he ended up dislocating the shoulder.

And I thought,

I remember hearing that and thinking like that's what it's like to try to control life.

Just try to resist life.

I bring that up because I was thinking too about how there's often this desire to control people in our lives.

You know control their behaviors.

So that again so we don't get hurt.

But nobody likes to be controlled.

And he attempts to control us.

We often go in the opposite direction.

So it never works.

Try to control another person.

I remember at this talk,

This clutter busting talk,

This guy said my brother he has all this clutter and it's just terrible.

And he's got to do something about it.

So what do I need to do to tell him to stop?

Just to get rid of his clutter.

I said there's absolutely nothing you can tell him.

And I meant it.

I've seen many people try to control another person's behavior specifically the clutter that they have in their lives.

And it always creates grief between the people whenever a person tries to do that.

It sours the relationship.

And I get it again.

It comes out of that feeling of like I don't want to get hurt so I want to protect myself.

So if I can control the people around me then I can avoid getting hurt.

But that's a sure way to be hurt because it hurts the relationship.

And relationships are one of the great things that we have going on in our lives.

I feel connection with somebody else.

That connection is broken when we try to control someone.

And you can see essentially that our relationship with life is broken when we try to control life.

And that's a great suffering.

That's a tremendous amount of pain.

Because the feeling of connection is one of the greatest feelings there is.

To feel connected with ourselves,

To feel connected with life,

To feel connected with other people,

To feel connected with whatever activity we're doing.

That feeling of connection is a feeling of unity.

Essentially it's a feeling of love.

And there's something about letting go of control and going with the flow which is basically going with love.

And it's something to consider,

Something to think about.

You know it's not like all right I need to stop controlling.

Like it's that in a sense it's like control because it's like a force to change or an attempt of force to change.

Something about bringing curiosity into the process and noticing the impulse to control when it comes up.

Often deep down there's this feeling when the impulse comes up of whatever it is that's happening shouldn't be happening.

It's happening but there's a feeling of like this is wrong.

This is out of order.

The universe is out of order.

And the curiosity is noticing when that comes up.

Noticing this feeling of like oh not only do I not like what's happening but I think it shouldn't be happening.

Even though it's happening it shouldn't be happening.

This person is being this particular way.

I don't like it and it shouldn't be happening.

Actually the I don't like it part you can't get rid of that.

That's that's that's part of the biology.

You know I don't like something.

That's a natural that's a natural thought.

That doesn't cause suffering.

Pain is part of life.

Sometimes we feel pain sometimes we feel pleasure and not liking something this pain.

But that feeling of should and then reacting to that should is the is the element of wanting to control.

And that's where things get really really really uncomfortable.

So I encourage you to think about this just to think about it and to notice in your life when that happens.

I mean really all change like really good change comes from noticing because there's curiosity and in curiosity is openness.

And luckily you don't have to wait too long for that impulse of control to come up because it comes up.

I think we're encouraged there's a lot of books out there and a lot of you know particular ways of thought that encourage like that control aspect.

This is all about coming back to yourself and noticing and noticing when when that comes up.

Because that noticing there's there's a kindness and that and then that kindness there's a feeling of relaxation and ease.

And that possibly could keep us from reacting with a strong determination to control.

In a sense we're talking about acceptance.

You can't make acceptance happen.

Acceptance is there's an openness to it and noticing on the kindness and acceptance occurs.

You can't control acceptance either.

I just find that this is a gentler way to live.

I try to bring this into my own life and when I work with clients I encourage them to consider this as an alternative to living them to living to a life of lived where one attempts to control life to such a degree that it exhausts them.

When you lived to that extent of life I control you end up being scared of life.

Being scared of being hurt.

But like I said pain is part of life you can't avoid it.

Half the time in life there's pain half the time there's pleasure.

It seems to work out that way.

Life works in extremes.

It's part of life's nature is to go from extreme to extreme.

And even noticing that there's a curiosity in that and a relaxation and a kindness.

So I wish you the best in this in this particular introspection.

We're going to control and and see what happens.

I wish you the best take care.

Reviews

I'd love to send this to my middle age daughter, but that would be trying to control her! 😂