Embracing the Grand Adventure of Human Experience

All of us human beings are on the grand adventure of creating and having a vast array of experiences for the purpose of expressing ourselves, discovering how to manage these experiences, learning from them, and enjoying them.

If this is so, then why do we spend so much time resisting our experiences? Regret, anxiety, depression, denial, disgust, disappointment, rejection, disapproval, judgment, annoyance, impatience, resentment, complaining and a whole host of other reactions are all ways in which we resist our experiences in life.

These are all ways we distance ourselves or try to get away from many of our experiences. It is as if we were saying, “I don’t like it. This is not what I was planning on or expecting my life to be like. I hate it. This is making me miserable and I don’t deserve this. I don’t want this experience so I am going to pretend it’s not really happening or it never happened at all.

I’ll just whistle a happy tune or paste a smile on my face and show the world that everything is fine or maybe I will just bury these feelings and act like it happened to someone else. Maybe I will just withdraw from everyone and live in my own isolated little world.”

These are just a few of the many possibilities afforded to us to resist our experiences. In some cases, the experiences we try to get away from are the happiest ones like when someone tells us they love us and we are so freaked out that we run away screaming because we don’t want to be vulnerable and possibly get hurt.

Perhaps we don’t want to feel trapped, don’t feel we deserve to be loved, or have a dozen other excuses for not wanting an experience we truly long for at a deeper level.

Fears That Run Our Resistance

If we look more deeply at these attempts to block or resist our experiences we can readily see how much our fears are running us. We are afraid of emotional pain, rejection, betrayal, being trapped, being abandoned, feeling compromised, being found out, being judged, being attacked, so many things.

Almost all these fears are based on perceptions, memories, considerations, ideas, perhaps not based on actual experiences at all. Maybe they are buried deep in our genes, epigenetic suffering inherited from our ancestors having nothing directly to do with our own narratives.

Maybe some of this resistance comes from observing what has happened to other people, our relatives, friends, and colleagues, and believing that could happen to us if we are not vigilant enough.

Undigested Experiences Make Us Sick

So here we are on our grand adventure, somehow hoping that the grand adventure doesn’t actually touch us because it might be indigestible. And there is an interesting word, indigestible.

Just like food some of our experiences are easy to digest and others are not. Perhaps they make us sick to our stomachs and want to throw up and get rid of the experience that we don’t like.

Perhaps I hear that I didn’t make the cut, didn’t get the promotion, failed to attain the position I applied for, didn’t get into the school I dreamed of and so on. I get the news and promptly throw up, try to refute it, get rid of it, but despite throwing up I am devastated and try hard not to think about my failure, without much success.

I rationalize it away by telling myself it is for the best, I didn’t really want it after all, I am better off without the headaches and the added responsibility. I tell myself that story over the years and one day I find that I am so disappointed in myself I don’t want to live any more or perhaps I just go self-destructive and start taking opioids, drugs, or alcohol.

Escaping Shame and the Power of Acceptance

There are so many ways to escape, so many ways to fail to get away from the shame. We are stuck with the experience because we didn’t allow it to fully express through us.

Typically, when I ask a person to give me the details of a traumatic experience, they can’t do it at first. They don’t remember who said what when, who was there, what they were wearing, whether it was day or night, what the sensations in their body were and so on.

Often, instead of asking for details it is easier to ask the person what color the event feels like when they look back on it, whether it feels sharp or dull, old or new, cold or hot and other more subjective impressions.

With a little prodding and exploring, people often realize they do remember more than they thought about what happened. It is as if shining a little light on the experience brings out details from the shadows and a real memory starts to form.

Digesting Past Traumas

They had the experience but did not digest it in that moment so it went into the closet so to speak, inaccessible for a time, undigested.

As they go through the event slowly in the safety of a session where they are accompanied by someone to guide them, they begin to digest the experience in a new way. They begin to notice considerations they had at the time, decisions that they made, sensations they forgot and so on.

An undigested experience can always be digested even if it took place twenty-five years ago.

A seventy-year old woman recalled an event from her youth where a man pulled a knife on her and tried to rape her and she recalled the deep shame she felt at that moment and how she felt that it was her fault.

As she began to digest the event she became aware that this was the signature event that colored her entire life from that moment on. Digesting the event allowed her to hold it differently and understand how and why it took place the way it did. The event now had new meaning for her as she accepted it and saw it with greater neutrality.

A middle-aged man recalled an incident where he had been gang raped during a hazing incident in college. He never told anyone and as far as he was concerned for many years it never happened.

Yet he knew that something was wrong and that he never felt successful after that. He never digested that experience until that day when he boldly agreed to go over it in great detail which he did.

As he did so a great calm came over him and he felt a great weight lift from his shoulders. He finally accepted what had occurred and was able to discuss it in surprising neutrality.

It no longer defined him and it became just another event in the narrative of his life, just part of a story. From that time, he began to allow himself more success in many endeavors of his life.

The Formula for Freedom

The secret to digesting an experience is in accepting it. If you are able to talk about it in detail you are de-facto accepting that it happened. The denial is erased and the acceptance results in the experience disappearing.

Disappearing does not mean that it never happened. It means that it is so neutralized that it has no hidden power to sabotage anything or influence anything from the shadows.

The formula is: Address it, accept it, digest it, neutralize it, erase its influence over your life, be free of it.

When you completely digest your food, it means you accept it into your body, and it empties out of your stomach and you are free to eat other foods that nourish you.

Experiencing Experiences Is Digesting Life

So, experiencing our experiences functions exactly the same way. To experience is to digest, every part of the meal. Why else would we have an experience?

Our experiences are our adventures, and yes sometimes they are painful. However, we learn from our experiences, they teach us if we let them.

You have probably heard this before but experiences don’t happen to us, they happen for us. Essence allows experiences that our personalities magnetize to us. That is the way we learn and evolve and move on.

If we get in the way of this natural phenomenon in the physical world, we are constipating the process, damming it all up, filling up the basement with undigested material that is never going to go away any other way and it will make us sick.

Invitation to Release and Heal

Ask yourself if you have unexperienced experiences stacked up in your subconscious closet. The truth is that we all do. They won’t go away through the process of resistance and denial. They are waiting to be invited into the light, out of the shadows. Our times are calling for it. This is the time, help is available from within.

An Important Caveat

In the case of some people who have suffered extremely serious traumas in their lives, they may require going through this process very slowly with a professional who does this kind of work for a living and understands pacing.

For many of us, the traumas and unexperienced experiences may be closer to the surface and might be ready to release with some personal attention and focus.

As they say when the student is ready the teacher appears. The teacher may be another person or it may be you yourself.

Try it on your own. If it is just too hard, enlist help. While there are a variety of techniques to do this, there is no other way to digest your experience than to accept it for what it is.

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