Airport Reflections
By: Rodrigo Meirelles
Tags: Reflections, Presence, Self Improvement, Authenticity, Happiness

Clique aqui para ler em Português.

There’s something about airports that inspires reflection. Perhaps it’s the fact of it being a mid-point between two destinations, which is analogous to life itself, a mid-point between what’s before birth and after death. It’s in this transitional point where life unfolds. Whether or not there is something beyond death is irrelevant to the fact that this life in this body and in this place in the universe is happening now, unfolding at every moment. Unfortunately, an aspect of our current human condition has led us away from the here-and-now and kept us always concerned about the past or the future. This is perhaps the most dreadful thing that could have happened to us, because if we are unable to experience the present as it is, we are unable to experience life as it unfolds.

Furthermore, this condition is what drives the capitalist system and most of our actions. Our inner dissatisfaction translates into a constant external search for happiness. We change cars, houses, jobs, countries and partners; we buy new clothes, things that we don’t need and objects of high monetary value but little intrinsic value; we diet, we go to the gym, we color our hair; all in search of happiness, or at least a moment of satisfaction in the midst of a life of dissatisfaction. However, we eventually realize that nothing external can give us the inner happiness we seek. I myself realized this when I returned to Brazil in search of happiness and realized that even after everything had gone even better than planned, that dissatisfaction was still inside me.

The reasons for this condition are much better explained by Eckart Tolle in The Power of Now, Michael Brown in The Presence Process, Gabor Maté in The Realm of Hungry Ghosts and other writers ranging from philosophers to psychologists and spiritual teachers. However, the underlying theme in all these writers seems to be the quality of our emotional development during childhood. Unfortunately, for many generations now, we no longer receive the emotional attention we need in order to properly develop resilience and the ability to deal in a healthy manner with our emotions. It is not my intention in this reflection to talk about why this is or what the ideal would be, but rather to point out that because of that lack, we have some work to do as adults.

This work is known by some as self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, shadow work, and psychoanalysis, to name a few. The paths may and will likely differ for each individual, but the destination is the same: bringing forth and integrating the emotions we have suppressed in an attempt to avoid suffering. According to Michael Brown, what stops us from being present is the constant attempt to escape from “negative” emotions, such as fear, anger, and grief, the same reason why we resort to the various addictions we turn to as self-medication. As Gabor Maté says, the addiction is not the problem, but an attempt to solve a problem and to escape from pain. Thus, to him the most important question is not why the addiction, but why the pain. Trying to answer this question is likely to take us back to our childhood.

When we look back to our childhood, we may be confronted with a memory of one or more situations in which we had to choose between connection and authenticity. In other words, something happened where we had to choose between maintaining a connection with our parents or caregivers, or our authenticity, our “true self”. Because of our dependence to an adult caregiver, we always choose connection over authenticity. Therefore, we begin to lose our connection to our true selves and start developing a personality that does not threaten our connection to our caregivers. Later on, those adaptations that at one point saved our lives, from the point-of-view of a child, no longer serve us and become obstacles to our experience of the present moment and to being authentic. Therefore, our work as adults is to recognize those adaptations, recognize the emotions that we are afraid of feeling and thus suppress, and work to reintegrate them into our life and letting go of the adaptations that no longer serve us.

This process requires a lot of patience, acceptance, love, openness and compassion for ourselves and those around us. No one else can do this work for us, but it is in relating to others that we recognize these patterns and begin to change them. It takes time to recondition behaviors, attitudes and thoughts, so we need to be gentle with ourselves. The reason why I am saying all this is because I have been on this journey for some time now and have gone through some stages of the process that might be worth sharing with others who are on a similar path or would like to begin the journey. It’s a unique process for each of us, but we can support and relate to each other along the way.

One recent stage I went through is the one in which I thought I had all the answers and I had to tell others not only about what I knew, but also how I thought they should live their lives based on what I knew. Although the intention behind it was good, wanting people to live a better life, to be happy, I realized that I did not have all the answers and that even after finding out how I should live my life, I should never tell someone else how to live theirs. I was very fortunate to have friends along this stage that stayed by my side and opened my eyes to what I was doing. To those I offended or hurt, I apologize. To those who remained by my side through this stage, I thank you sincerely. Now I know that the best way to impact others in this process is to live it yourself and let the changes in your behavior, attitude and energy speak for themselves.

Another challenging stage was the stage of blaming. When I was first introduced to these ideas, I began to blame my parents for not having given me what I needed in order to have had a healthy emotional development. Thankfully, I lived far away and didn’t have many conversations with them about this subject, which gave me time to reconsider these ideas and realize that no one is to blame. Everyone is doing the best they can at any given time. If your parents didn’t give you the support you think you needed, it’s not their fault, they were doing the best they could with what they received from their parents and their parents’ parents, ad infinitum. That’s true for everyone else, your boss, coworker, classmate, girlfriend, boyfriend, and so on. Although I have come to this conclusion logically, I am not yet able to feel this way about every person I interact with, but that is part of the process. There will always be people who will challenge us, those are our gurus.

Now, I believe I am in the stage of acceptance. I heard once that “acceptance is the key to transformation”, it sounded so true that I now repeat it often in my head. The most challenging and important aspect of myself I had to accept was my sexuality. I’ve always known that I wasn’t like most boys, I was more “feminine”, I liked dancing, cooking and playing with the girls. In a country like Brazil, being a feminine boy is unacceptable to most people. I felt judged and repressed by kids and adults alike. Thus, I had to adapt, and I became overly aware of my feminine manners, how I spoke, how I moved, how I dressed. I would do everything I could to appear manlier. Talk about choosing connection and acceptance over authenticity. However, there was one thing I could not change: who I felt sexually attracted to. When I was a teenager, I felt attracted to girls and guys, and because of that I thought I could go on living as if this other aspect of my sexuality wasn’t there, or it would somehow go away if I ignored it long enough. It didn’t. It started to become more and more challenging to ignore, my relationships with girls started to feel less and less truthful, something was always missing. Until it reached a point where I either accepted who I was, or it would consume me and drive me crazy. So, I accepted it.

It is still hard for me to know what is part my true self and what is part of the personality I developed to fit in. One way I’ve found to make that distinction is how natural a behavior feels, the more natural and easier it is, the closer it is to my true self. For that reason, I chose not to put myself into limiting categories, so that I allow myself to navigate through my experiences more easily by doing what feels natural to me, not what is expected of one category or the other. I should once again make the point here that each individual’s experience is unique, so find what feels more natural to you, this is not a one-size-fits-all process. One piece of advice I would give, however, is to respect your process and the process of those around you. It is likely that your process will have a big impact on those close to you, be gentle with them and respect their time. This is not to say that you should sacrifice your process for that of someone else but find a way that will be best for all of those involved.

This process I have been talking about does not have an end or a graduation, it’s a lifetime journey. For that reason, enjoy every aspect of it. Be thankful for the challenges life throws at you because they are there for you to learn from them and grow as a result of it. Also, something I find extremely important is not to take any of this too seriously. Play! I have a good friend who sees life as a video game. I love that perspective because it implies that we are free to experiment, take risks and try different things. Plus, our child self still lives within us, listen to them and you will see that all they want is love, attention and to play and be joyous. It is important to rebuild our relationship with that part of ourselves and listen to its needs. You will see how much more fulfilled you will feel from providing your inner child what it needs.

I would like to end with an invitation for you to commit to this journey within, if you haven’t yet. I said earlier that I would not tell others how to live their lives, and this is not what I am doing, I am simply exposing an idea and inviting you to explore it for yourself, if it resonates with you. I think if we all work on our internal conflicts, our external conflicts will be much easier to be resolved. With that, I wish you all a lot of love and light in your journeys and make myself available to any of you who would like to talk about any of this… may we all reconnect!