The There Is Game

As anybody going through a major life crisis can tell you, you get overwhelmed a lot. And when this happens, and it will, all the usual suspects come out to play/torment. Anxiety, spiraling, self-destructive behavior, etc. Despite always hanging around, these states of being are not our friends. Even a simple distraction, which can be a welcome reprieve (hellloooooo PBS British Dramas!), aren’t the best way to overcome the overwhelm.

So what do we do?

There is an endless list of healthy coping strategies and whichever one seems to work for you, that’s the one you should go towards. And what might work somedays might not work on others and vice versa. Just like in playing music, you do what you know works, and when it doesn’t, you do something else.

I wanted to write this short blog to tell you about something that has been working wonders for me, and I call it the “There Is” game.

When the surge of all that heavy shit hits, it’s natural to think to yourself “I am sad. I am afraid. I am abandoned. I am totally beyond a shadow of a doubt fucked” etc. And I was doing that a lot when all these challenges showed up in my life. And when you think “I am this,” then you embody whatever it is you are feeling. And maybe that’s better than running away from your feelings. But it takes so much willpower to stay strong in those moments. And that can be pretty exhausting, which leads to being more susceptible to all of those moments hitting hard in a way that really cuts deep.

I noticed that these feelings were so much easier to deal with if instead of saying “I am” I started saying “There Is.” We aren’t running from our feelings if we say this, but we are building something like a wall between a feeling and our identity. And this wall can be powerful!

“There is sadness. There is fear. There is abandonment. There is a sense that I am fucked”, etc. For some reason, this small change is magic. It protects the self as a powerful and somewhat separate thing that is very capable of handling all of it.

I’ve been playing this game a lot lately, and each time I amazed at how much it has helped my confidence grow. And I even started doing it with good feelings too. You know what happened? It actually made me appreciate the good feelings even more. When we build this wall around the self, the self is then easily capable of seeing things as they are, and not necessarily how we react to them. And seeing things as they are is ultimately the way to peace.

So give this game a shot the next time you are feeling low. Or even just for fun for a few minutes while you watch 3 episodes of The West Wing while cuddling your Pomeranian. Let me know if this is something you dig.

There is joy that you read this far and there is joy that I know you,

Benny