Proyecto de Acuerdo
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We look for happiness in all the wrong places. Like a moth flying into the flame, we destroy ourselves in order to find temporary relief. Because we often find such relief, we continue to reinforce old patterns of suffering and strengthen
dysfunctional patterns in the process. —Pema Chödrön
W
hat matters to you? This is one of the most profound questions we’ll ask you to consider and reconsider throughout this book and for the rest of your life. Most people don’t think about it until it’s too late to do something about it. We don’t want to see that happen to you.Here we’re going to walk you through two exercises that’ll help you connect with what you want to be about in this life: a funeral meditation (adapted from Hayes et al., 1999) and writing your own epitaph. These exercises are very powerful and even a bit frightening. The payoff for doing them is a clearer vision of what you want your life to stand for. The exercises also reveal what struggling with WAFs has cost you.
We all know that death is inevitable. Sometimes we can delay death, but we can’t avoid it. Although we can’t control when or how we’ll die, we can control how we live from this day forward. We know
from testimonies that something profound happens when people have been near the precipice between life and death and have survived to live another day. Their lives change in dramatic ways.
Facing death forces people to take stock. And when they do that, many people end up radically changing what they’ve been doing and begin spending more time doing things they really care about. Old habits and activities that once seemed so important become trivial.
In short, contacting the precipice between life and death wakes people up. Something clicks. People change what they do and how they live in ways that are richer and more vital and meaningful than before. They make a choice to spend their remaining time on this planet doing things that matter. These activities are what they (and you) will be remembered for. The following exercise will help you make contact with this simple truth in a deeper way.
ExErCiSE: funeral MeDiTaTion
Go ahead and get comfortable. Imagine that you’re observing your own funeral. Visualize yourself in a casket. Smell the fresh flowers. Hear the soft music in the background. Look around the room. Who do you see?
Perhaps you can see your loved ones, family, friends, relatives, coworkers, and people you’ve met at one time or another. Listen closely to the conversations and what they’re saying about you. What’s your partner saying . . . your kids . . . your best friend . . . your colleagues . . . your neighbor?
Listen carefully to each of them as they say the words that, in your heart, you most want to hear about yourself. This is how you want the people that you care about to remember you. Your wisdom will let you pick and choose exactly what you want and need to hear from them.
Now just pause for a moment and keep imagining this situation. Go ahead, sit back, and close your eyes. Stay with this image for a few minutes. Then come back to reading.
Remember the comments you heard. In your heart of hearts, what did you want to hear about your life? Take a moment and jot down what you heard and wanted to hear said about you in the lines below.
What I heard people say about me was . . .
What I wanted to hear people say about me was . . .
There’s something critically important in what you heard and wrote down a moment ago: each utterance reflects your values, what you really want your life to be about. And what you heard others say about you was based on what they see you doing.
Some of what you heard may have left you feeling disappointed. Perhaps one person said, “He was always so anxious and uptight. . . . I wish he’d done more with his life” or “She had a tough life . . . never getting past her fears and worries.”
The good news about this exercise is that your life isn’t over yet. Your eulogies haven’t been written. You still have time to do things to be the type of person you want to be. You can start living the way you want to be remembered later on.
There’s another reason for doing this exercise. This reason is more practical and has to do with gaining perspective on your life and your actions. You won’t be able to see the costs of the anxiety struggle in your life unless you can see what you want to be about. Anxiety is costly precisely because it gets in the way of what you want to do. If this weren’t so, you wouldn’t be reading this book. You’d be just like the millions of other people who have their share of WAFs, among other sources of hardship and pain, and yet march on doing what matters to them.
The next exercise builds on the previous one. It’ll help you to connect with what you truly care about in life and where you’d go if your WAFs weren’t ruling the roost.
This may seem like another strange and somewhat scary exercise. If you stick with it and complete it and feel a bit upset, then you’ll get in touch with what you want your life to stand for. So don’t rush. Find a quiet place to reflect, openly and honestly, about what it is that makes your life worthwhile. If you need to do this exercise in several sittings, then do that.
ExErCiSE: wriTe Your anxieTY ManageMenT epiTaph
Your task in this exercise is to write your epitaph (the inscription on your gravestone) as it would be written if you were to die today. What would it say if it was about what you’ve been doing with your anxiety manage- ment? What have you become by living in the service of your WAFs? Bring to mind all of your WAF coping- and-management strategies and be mindful of how they’ve gotten in the way of what you want to do. Think of everything you say aloud, think to yourself, or do with your hands or feet before, during, or after the WAFs show up to keep them at bay. List them all.
Here is what Joan, a woman with a fifteen-year history of struggle with panic, wrote for her Anxiety Management Epitaph.
Joan’s Epitaph
Here Lies Joan—A Long-Time Panic Sufferer
She spent the last eight years of her life homebound for fear of panic. She visited her doctor dozens of times and refilled countless prescriptions. She was unable to work and had few friends outside her immediate family. She avoided crowds, unfamiliar places, driving, and long-distance travel. She hadn’t gone to the beach or watched a sunset from a mountaintop since high school. She spent her evenings surfing the Web for infor- mation about anxiety and reading books about her anxiety problem. Her husband was her safety net and pacifier—without him she wasn’t able to do anything. Her life was about not having panic, and she left this earth enslaved by this goal and never having conquered it.
Now, when you’re ready, go ahead and write your Anxiety Management Epitaph. Print a copy of the blank tombstone from the CD and work off that.
The exercises up until now were probably difficult to do, and it should be that way. We asked you to face squarely what your life has become in the service of anxiety and its management. The next exercise ought to be more uplifting.
We’d like you to do another epitaph-writing exercise, but with a twist. This time, we’d like you to write your epitaph as you’d really like it to read, without the stains of anxiety and fear and its man- agement. You can think of this epitaph as representing the things you truly care about and wish to be known for. Rather than your anxiety epitaph, this is your Valued Life Epitaph!