Although Western culture shames citizens who aren’t busily working away the tick-tock of their day, the resulting symptoms of adult play-deprivation are anything but charismatic. Here’s what Dr. Brown found as the byproducts of adults withholding play from their daily lives: lack of vital life engagement; diminished optimism; stuck-in-a-rut feeling about life, with little curiosity or exploratory imagination to alter their situation; predilection to escapist temporary fixes such as alcohol (or other compulsions); a personal sense of being life’s victim rather than life’s conqueror. In sum: withholding play from your life is NOT what you should do if you’re looking to increase your charisma quotient.
THE ANSWER
Back to the question at hand: Why aren’t we confident? We are born full of wonder and reverence for Reality, in all its splendor and mystery, but culture condemns us for being “childish,” “naive,” and “uneducated.” A gaping hole exists in our souls, a hunger to be exploited by advertisers offering comfort-stuffed Band-Aids: food, fashion, cigarettes, cinema, boobs, botox, and booze. The only reason this works is because a poisonous seed was planted long, long ago. This one old, stupid idea that keeps people scared, makes us behave, and threatens us with hellfire. You ready? I hinted at it before. Here it is:
GREAT STUFF VERSUS BAD STUFF
That’s it. It came with our apple-eating, Garden of Eden, cultural mythology. While you may have placed your attention on the main point (God’s wrath at the biblical couple’s newfound ability to tell right from wrong), you may have missed the underlying message: that “good” and “bad” exist at all. See, when we feel bad about ourselves, there’s something really subtle going on, but it only seems subtle because it’s been hammered into us, over hundreds of years, to the point that we barely think to question it.
The ideas of good and evil are deeply ingrained in our cultural mythology, but when we use these dichotomies for any reason whatsoever, we apply a dangerous logic: If some characters are worthy of love and others are not, if some cleaning supplies are evil and others are our friends, if some clothes are so last season and others are fabulous, if some countries are terrorist nations and others are our buddies—do you see the pattern? Whether we’re talking about people, products, pants, or politics—we’ve been told that matter can be made of bad stuff.
We’ve lost touch with the greatness in all things. We think that maybe only some of the matter on earth is good and we should be frantically collecting that stuff and discarding the bad. Since we’re taught that we can’t trust ourselves to know which is which, we learn to fear what we have and reach for the next thing. If you aren’t carrying the latest touchpad device, advancing your career, or fixing your body flaws, then maybe you are not good enough. Maybe you are the bad stuff. Somebody is. It could be you!
This fear of inadequacy paralyzes us. When you feel the guilt that comes with thinking you are bad stuff, your body releases inflammatory substances. Inflammation is what we find when there is trauma to or infection in the body’s tissues. Here’s the kicker: You make it yourself. Your guilt and shame send a signal to your body, telling you that you’re being attacked. In response, your body sends floods of fluids and fighter cells to protect itself. In other words, the state of guilt and shame is a physical attack. You’re fighting yourself. Your body cannot tell the difference between your thoughts and a virus. The resulting inflammation is systemic and leads to all kinds of nastiness.
Tragically, in this lush first world of ours, many people spend their whole lives fighting the bad feelings the only way they know how: by earning small change to purchase short-term self-medication in the aforementioned forms of food, fashion, cigarettes, cinema, booze, boobs, and erectile-tissue enhancers. The result? In the United States, the richest nation on earth, depression is epidemic.
Here’s the good news: None of that logic works on you if you stop believing in bad stuff. When you choose to believe you’re made of great stuff, you have no need to waste your time being afraid and insecure, so your body has no need to send unnecessary inflammatory fighter responses, and you can get back to the good sh——t: exploring yourself, exploring your environment, and getting in touch with this f——ing moment! Are you ready to stop asking what if I’m not enough and start asking what if I am? If you’re okay with being a cultural rebel, sincerely ask yourself the following question right now: What if I am enough?
You are. The rest is makeup. Grace is the state we are in when we are doing nothing but just being who we are.
Next question is: Are you ready to stop running and start experiencing? I warn you: The charge of the here and now is electrifying! Rasping and riveting, laughing and belly hurting, tingling and cringing, smashing and contracting, expanding and orgasming. It’s messy and it’s wet and it bubbles over sometimes. There is phlegm. Oh, yeah. Living in the present demands every fiber of your being, and it will force you to grow and blossom and vomit out magic in ways you never thought possible; and you’ve been trained to run away from it your whole life. But baby, I’m here to tell you, it’s what you were born for. Are you ready to choose it? It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be great!
“In the beginning was the Word. (John 1:1) Before the Word was . . . THE.”
THE-: [COMBINING FORM. FROM GREEK THEOS: GOD]
THE CHOICE
I believe that God is our highest instinct to know ourselves.
DEEPAK CHOPRA
One night, I was unable to sleep. Anxious thoughts riddled my mind, and I struggled to calm myself. Eventually I got up to stand by the window, and by chance, I found myself admiring the curve of my shoulder under my nightgown. Then I looked up to the perfectly green ivy growing on the Los Angeles stucco, and I felt the caress of the cool air between us. That’s when it dawned on me, as it sometimes does, that I have absolutely no idea where this life came from.
I imagined the magnificent pictures taken by NASA showing spirals upon spirals of galaxies above me and felt the impending squish from this uncontrollably large universe, like an ant under a human foot en route to Starbucks, and you know what? I liked it. It made me more present, like a hot needle pressing skin. Here I Am! In the midst of eternity, I exist! Next time you think you or your circumstances suck, go outside and look up. In the presence of the vast, wordless sky, you’ll see those negative thoughts are really all just little stuff. But we often forget. And when we do, confidence gets lost.
The key to feeling confident in the middle of a wildly distracting world is perspective, and the only way to gain any real perspective is by anchoring yourself firmly in the present. How can you know how to relate to what is around you unless you know who, what, and where you are? There are simple tools to get you there . . . or here, as the case may be. Let’s start at the beginning.
Have you ever noticed that when you pause to take a deep breath or become attentive to your lover’s breath, a sense of peace washes over you? Maybe you’ve felt peaceful when you are deeply engaged in making music or writing a poem? How about when you look at the colors in a sea-blown sunset or smell the clarity in mountain air? Maybe you experience peace most when you’re racing cars or rock climbing? When do you recall a time when you felt truly at peace?
Peace comes when we are fully engaged with whatever we are doing. Another name for this is presence. The more you spend time engaged with the present, the more people will experience you as “larger than life,” “a charismatic personality,” someone they themselves want to engage with. Being engaged with the present means you have chosen to be curious with where you are, what’s around you, and how you’re feeling. When you’re present, you’re open and porous to experience and ready to let it