Control Is Killing Us

Life is NOT under our control. Our emotions are not under our control. Often even our minds are not under our control. Yet we have given our minds the impossible task of controlling everything in our lives in order to avoid hurt and pain. This episode explores the possibility that it's actually our need for control that hurts us more than anything else. But what if instead, we could radically trust ourselves to handle absolutely anything?
Please note: This track may include some explicit language.

Transcript

Wake the Fuck Up,

The podcast that mingles mindfulness,

Buddhism,

Brain science,

Evolutionary biology,

And real authentic human experience.

Welcome to Wake the Fuck Up.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Wake the Fuck Up podcast.

My name is Tiffany Andres and I am so deeply happy to be here with you today.

Today's episode is about control.

I already know I intend to title this episode,

Control is Killing You,

But in reality it came from the recognition that control was killing me.

We spend so much of our lives,

My dears,

Trying to control everything that happens within us and around us.

We have ideas for what we need in order to be happy,

What it looks like to be successful,

What an awakened version of ourselves would think and feel moment by moment.

We spend so much of every single day not being with the experiences that are happening around us and inside of us,

But instead trying to change them,

To control them,

To make them into something more beautiful than the way we perceive them in the moment.

If you've listened to this podcast before,

You've probably heard me reference a beautiful,

Radiant,

Incredible human being named Sarah Blondin.

Sarah also has a podcast called Live Awake and if you haven't listened,

I highly encourage you to listen.

Every single word she speaks is absolutely beautiful and sounds to me like poetry.

Her episodes are much like a living meditation.

You can listen with eyes open or eyes closed.

You can sit quietly or be doing something else and it doesn't really matter because the words she speaks are so profound.

When it comes to control,

One of the things that always stands out that I heard years ago that Sarah said is that which you are resisting may just be your dreams coming into form.

Recently I've had the recognition that in this new space in my life,

There's a sense of freedom and openness to whatever is and whatever might be.

In essence,

How new and raw and real everything has been over the last few months has led to this feeling that I can't even really imagine what the most beautiful,

Perfect,

True version of my life might look like in the future.

There have been many people that I've talked to in the last few months that see my lack of goals or targets as some form of floundering or as though something is missing.

I want to offer a different perspective that if you can imagine yourself on the path,

The journey,

The experience of your life and where you are today,

What you know,

What you want out of life and compare that just for a moment to five years ago or ten years ago or depending on your age,

Maybe twenty.

And I imagine that what you envision for yourself as the most beautiful life you could possibly have sitting here today listening is so different than even last year or five years ago or ten years ago and taking that reflection and proliferating it into the future,

Moving it in the opposite direction.

I feel like we can understand together that where we are right now in this moment cannot even possibly conceive of the radiance and the beauty of a life that we could be living in who we become five years from now or ten years from now.

So how interesting is it that we set these trajectories,

These goals,

These places we need to go in order for life to be and feel fulfilling and yet we're setting those goals from the place we're in in this moment without even having the possibility of conceiving what life could be like in the future.

And this is not at all to say that goals are useless or unimportant.

When we want something we move towards it,

Right?

I'm in the process currently of becoming certified to skydive autonomously.

I'm learning,

I'm in the process of certification,

I have a goal to be certified to be able to fly solo and free.

I also bought myself a motorcycle and kind of feels like skydiving on the earth and just finished my licensing class last week.

So these are goals,

Right?

They're things that we know we desire for ourselves,

Expressions of ourselves and our freedom,

Ways we want to experience and engage with our lives and the world and I think that's radiant and beautiful.

But there's a difference between setting goals,

Having desires,

Knowing things that we want for ourselves and then when life moves in a way that's different,

Rejecting life as it comes.

I want to offer an example here that's felt incredibly powerful to me.

As I shared in the last episode,

I've been in the process of divorce and separation from my wife of 10 years and one of the most powerful and amazing outcomes that I never could have imagined from this separation is that the friendships in my life have been expansive and blossoming.

I would say I have a new best friend and this was someone that was a source of pain and discomfort in my marriage,

Someone my wife was not a fan of and there was restriction in the freedom of the ways in which I could engage with this incredible human.

As a result of my separation,

That freedom is ever present and the relationship has become something that is so beautiful,

So enriching and so fulfilling.

When the separation first started,

Of course I was in a place of control trying to do my best to keep my marriage.

I spent months doing everything I could to change myself,

To change my life,

To try to fit in to what she needed me to be because I was so desperate to not have things change,

To not experience loss of someone that I loved.

What I find on the other side is that the love I feel for her is still here and yet now here's this beautiful opportunity for that love to expand beyond a single individual and into others.

My love feels larger,

It feels more vast,

It feels more free and true.

I never could have imagined eight months ago,

A year ago,

Six months ago that this would be the life I was living,

The outcome was dark.

I listened to a recording of Alan Watts the other day.

Yet another thing I'll offer that I think is wildly amazing is a YouTube channel called After School,

S-K-O-O-L,

And they take powerful,

Beautiful talks and animate them as the person is speaking and it's quite beautiful,

The animation is incredible.

The talk that I listened to the other day was titled Life is Not a Journey and I love the illusion that and the analogy that Alan Watts makes in this short four minute conversation that we spend our lives thinking there is a certain place we have to get to whether it is an experience of success,

Financial freedom or stability,

Whether it's having a family or a career,

Whether it's from a religious place of heaven,

You know,

Life after death,

Whatever it may be for you,

We spend our whole lives with this idea that we have somewhere we need to go.

And Alan Watts offers the incredible thought and concept and feeling that life really is more like a piece of music.

It's inherently playful,

It's about the experience itself,

It's not about the end.

He says in this talk like if music was about the point we were getting to then the most successful composers would be the ones that just composed one note,

The most successful conductors would be the ones that conducted the fastest and the conducted the fastest is the piece that really struck me in the heart because how much of our lives do we spend rushing and running because we feel like there's somewhere to go.

We're trying to get somewhere.

It's this quiet undertone of trying to control everything that exists in our world because we have a place we need to be.

And the reality is if we treat life like a piece of music where everything that comes and goes is another note to be enjoyed and explored and immersed inside of that my loves is freedom.

We become free the moment we accept that we can't control the experiences we have in our lives.

I'll be honest with you when I first started practicing meditation and mindfulness and I feel like this languaging is still out there in the world that there's this idea that through the practice of mindfulness we can control ourselves and our responses in the world.

And while that last piece,

Our responses in the world,

I do believe to be true,

Right,

That through mindfulness,

Through widening that gap between stimulus and response we have the ability to breathe into how we feel and what's here and to choose how we engage with whatever is present.

That's real.

But what's not real is the idea that through the practice of mindfulness and meditation we can control our humanness or our conditioning,

That we can control the innate ways our bodies and minds respond to any given stimulus inner or outer.

Things happen and they strike us in the heart.

The heart closes and it's painful.

And it's in that moment that yes,

We have a choice with what to do with that pain,

That discomfort,

That closing in,

That shutting down.

But a choice is not control,

Right?

A choice is an opening up.

It's our choice to let go more fully into those moments.

To even in the moments where we're hurting,

Relinquishing control and just say,

I'm here,

I'm here with you.

I can be with this.

I think fundamentally when I look back at my own life,

The thing that has changed the most radically to allow my own relinquishing of control that's come in these last few months is recognizing that until 35,

Which is how old I am now,

I never trusted myself.

In all of my self-reflection up until this point in my life,

There was never a moment that I looked at my past experiences and recognized that I have gotten myself through every difficult moment and experience I have ever had.

That doesn't mean that I did it gracefully every time.

That doesn't mean that I did it skillfully or well.

I absolutely fucked it up over and over and over again.

But here I am sitting here with you having this conversation.

Here I am learning and growing and finding life to be more and more beautiful.

And I think this is the power and the exquisite-ness of our human experience that this is true for all of us.

Even when we get into,

I'm going to use the word moments,

Right?

Moments in life.

And when I say moments,

I mean,

You know,

It could be a breath or it could be months or it could be years.

But these moments in life that are fucking hard and painful and they hurt and they close us down and they break us open,

That to be human innately means we are learning and growing.

I mean,

My loves from the cellular level,

We are adaptable.

If you take a stem cell and you put it in one medium,

It turns into a muscle.

If you put it into another medium,

It turns into a bone.

If you put it into another one,

It turns into a nerve cell.

This is the cells that your body is made of.

They are adaptable based on the environment that you put them in.

All of these millions of cells are changing constantly.

You are changing constantly at the cellular level.

And if I take you and I put you in one environment,

You're going to become something that matches it.

If you took that same person and put it in a different environment,

You would become something different.

The idea that we know where we're going is so limited and in a way crazy to think that we have any idea what life is going to present to us.

And if we think of the whole of our life experience like some petri dish,

Then we have to know that every single medium in that petri dish is going to create a different outcome of ourselves,

But trust,

Oh,

Trust.

Trust means that we say to ourselves,

Regardless of what the medium of life is in any moment,

I trust myself to be with it.

I trust myself to handle it and stay okay to eventually,

No longer how long that moment is to become a better version of myself,

To see the world with eyes of kindness and more beauty and love,

To get closer and closer over my lifetime to the truth of who I am.

And I'll offer here,

It's my personal belief that the truth of who we all are is love.

That when we let all of our conditioning and our pain,

All of our sadness and our hurt and our grief and our rejection from past experiences and current fears fall away,

That's all that's left is love.

So it's trust.

It's trust,

My dears and ourselves that allows for the relinquishing of control.

And yes,

I think to a certain degree,

It's trust in the innate goodness of the world,

That we don't live in a world and in a universe that is innately punishing.

There's nothing outside of us seeking to put us in our fucking place.

The world is just the world.

It's the natural order of things.

If we look at lightning striking a tree,

It didn't happen because that tree did something bad or it needed to be punished.

And the same is true of us,

We are these exquisite amalgamations of stardust,

These phenomenas of nature that are subject to the laws of the natural orders of the universe,

Just like a spider or a tree or a fish.

And if we can trust ourselves to handle absolutely any experience that happens,

We open ourselves rawly,

Beautifully to the life that's presenting itself in front of us.

And again,

That doesn't mean that that life in moments won't be hard,

It won't be painful.

But again,

If we trust ourselves to just be with those experiences,

Then the change,

The love,

The freedom that comes from not needing to control.

Oh,

It's immense.

And I think I want to end with one last piece here.

I think it's so important to recognize that some circumstances that we will be experiencing and immersed in in our lives are absolutely not okay.

As someone fresh on the other side of an often abusive relationship,

What I can tell you is that to relinquish control,

And to trust ourselves and to love does not mean that we don't make courageous,

Necessary,

Compassionate,

Strong warrior choices for what is beneficial for ourselves and our lives.

When I look back at why I stayed,

Why I allowed myself to continue to be hurt,

What was really there is a lack of love for myself.

And even in a certain way for my partner.

If I look back at these difficult moments where I know I should have made a different more courageous,

More love filled choice,

What was there was a closing in and a shutting off of fear of being alone,

Fear of hurting the other person.

And I can imagine myself standing in those moments,

Letting my walls come down and feeling love,

True love for myself,

And for her,

Not disapproving of what was there in that moment.

And if I had felt that the answer would have been clear.

Love is not abuse.

The courage,

The energy to act from love is so much greater than the courage and the energy to act from fear and from a need to control.

The clarity of our choices when we rest in love and tenderness is so readily available that I want to be clear that as we talk about relinquishing control,

Stepping into trust,

Stepping into love,

What that is not is submissive.

Instead,

It is a letting go and an opening fully into the radical acceptance of what's there,

And what that invites us to do is act courageously from deep truth and knowing of what is beneficial for ourselves and yes,

For others,

Because allowing someone to harm us isn't in benefit of that person either.

I want to thank you so deeply for listening,

For sharing this moment with me today.

I hope as this episode ends that you might look up from whatever you're doing,

See the colors,

The shapes,

The textures,

Embody the smells,

The feeling of your breath.

And in just this moment,

Acknowledge that you have gotten yourself through every single difficult moment you have ever lived.

You are strong,

You are beautiful,

You are capable,

And you deserve your own trust moving forward in your life.

To know that this life is going to continue to love you and yes,

Break you open in quiet and large ways to become more fully the person that you are naturally inside,

A being of overflowing love.

Thank you so much for being here with me.

Until next time.

Reviews

Don't let the intro scare you off. Please listen to her beautiful words. She shared so much wisdom and kindly shared her own experiences to set example to the practices she offers. The trust she spoke of. This. This may be the key. Control is an illusion, choice is ours, trust is release. Thank you 🙏

A soothing step towards awareness with self xxx thank you 💜🙏💜

Thank you for sharing this insightful talk 🙏❤️💪, I am glad to acknowledge the realisation that I got myself to where I am in any given moment.