by Gary Z McGee; The Mind Unleashed
“Meaning and morality of One’s life come from within oneself. Healthy, strong individuals seek self-expansion by experimenting and by living dangerously. Life consists of an infinite number of possibilities and the healthy person explores as many of them as possible. Religions that teach pity, self-contempt, humility, self-restraint and guilt are incorrect. The good life is ever changing, challenging, devoid of regret, intense, creative and risky.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche
Everyone has stumbled, made errors, or felt weak at times. Poor choices lead to painful outcomes, but there's no need to dwell in despair. There's no reason to stay trapped in a rut, complaining to higher powers or futilely resisting the universe.
A moment arrives when, after tending to our wounds, recovering sufficiently, and extracting lessons from our errors, we must rise from misery and get to the core of things. It's time to delve into the roots of the self, to turn madness into medicine. Time to seize the bull by its horns and reshape it into a more manageable form. Time to gather the ashes of anger and pain and hunt for the hidden phoenix egg within.
1. Seek Self-Expansion; Live Dangerously
Embrace risks. Act despite the faint-hearted. Defy any so-called authority. Be an unapologetic risk-taker, but be strategic. Stay fluid and smart.
So you've messed up before. So what! Everyone has. Some more than others. Comparing your flaws to another's strengths is the worst move. Reclaim your power and then take risks with it. Push your comfort zone over the edge until it hurts, then retreat and heal.
Make more mistakes if necessary. Make bigger, better mistakes that you can later use to build something greater than anyone could imagine.
Live dangerously. Be fleet-footed and precarious. Challenge the gods. Disobey the powers that be. Hold onto your power. Sometimes you just need to shrug, grit your teeth, laugh at past errors, stare into the void ahead, grab the Bull of the Present by the horns, and say: forget it! Time to turn this mess into gold.
2. Be Adventurous; Explore
A whole world awaits. Use your flaws to fuel the courage needed for a leap of faith. Life is either a series of courageous leaps or a handicap of stagnation. Choose to leap into ever new soul-awakening, heart-breaking adventures. Avoid daily grinds that drain your spirit. Live with purpose, not expectations.
Turn the obstacle into the path. Exploit your ruthlessness. Don't waver in the face of change. Flip the script. Turn the tables. Take the reins of your life from whoever or whatever currently holds them. Take control of the only thing you can control—yourself. From this moment until your last day, you have the chance to live the life you've always wanted.
Death is a compass. So take the ceiling of your heart and crucify it. Use that compass to guide you into adventure. Existentially burn out. Sink your teeth into the pulp of experience. Open your heart and keep your soul's hand steady on the helm as you sail toward the horizon of a new way of being human.
3. Be Creative; Transform Pain into Art
Harness your flaws—they'll give you courage. And nothing is more courageous than the creative act. Expand yourself artistically. Don't worry about whether it's good. Imaginatively magnify your pain into art. Don't fret if it seems silly or eccentric. Eccentricity is innovation's best friend.
What matters is the catharsis. What matters is healthy transformation. This works especially well on repressed emotions. The drawback is feeling the pain again, but that is far outweighed by the benefit of feeling healthier after co-creating art with that pain. In fact, it's precisely the renewal and renegotiation with the pain that prevents it from becoming further repressed and cloaked in unhealthy, unreconciled shadow energy.
The result is a kind of cosmic catharsis that elevates suffering to a higher level. It channels death anxiety into a work of art that symbolically turns pain into power and death into life.
The art born from cosmic catharsis becomes the art of living. It's the unfolding of life as art and art as life. What Ernest Becker called our “immortality project”—a creative, heroic engagement with life that creates meaning, purpose, and significance in the grand scheme. It's a way of transforming mortal pain into immortal art.
4. Live Intensely; Transform Wounds into Wisdom
The life energy of the soul cannot be stopped—except by you. You alone have the power to unstop it. So what are you waiting for? Use your flaws to propel you into greatness. Live passionately despite the passionless. Life is too short to stay tight inside the comfortable bud of a less-than-exciting existence. Break free. Face your demons, or they will demonize you.
If you truly want to live greatly, you must open yourself to being present to your wounds. You must open yourself to negotiation and reconciliation with your demons. The wound of yesterday can become the wisdom of tomorrow, but it must be embraced and reconciled in the present. This moment is all you have. Right now is always the time for transformation. Is it 'one day' or 'day one'? You decide.
Transforming wounds into wisdom is an act of love toward the darkest part of ourselves. This act of love can dissolve mountains. It can melt hardened repressions, revealing the sacred darkness beneath: your struggling shadow. It's there that you learn one of the most powerful secrets: the shadow can be your worst enemy or your greatest ally.
5. Live Adaptively; Shatter the Façade
Look into a mirror—preferably a broken one. Look past your many masks. Strip your soul naked, then love what remains. Shed your too-thick skin. Reinvent transformation itself. Don new masks: Hero, Trickster, Warrior; Crow, Whale, Wolf. Realize that finding yourself is not an end or a beginning but a story constantly unfolding. Your story, if you have the courage to be its author.
Shatter the façade. Everything is changing anyway. Nothing stays the same. There is no permanence except impermanence itself. Embrace that fact. Everything moves in and out of itself. You move in and out of 'yourself.' Let yourself move.
A façade is anything saying otherwise—anything fixed and rigid, anything unwilling to change and thus forced into becoming a living deprivation, a wanton suppression, a whiny expectation. Shatter it. Break it across the world.
Smash it into a thousand pieces at the feet of all who wish to remain stagnant and complacent. Staple it to a wall and throw darts at it. Pull it down from all its high and mighty pedestals and high-horses, then force it to dance in the abyss with you, performing insouciant pirouettes around it. This is your life. Nobody is coming to save it. This is your pain. Nobody else will feel it. This is your flaws. It is your responsibility, and yours alone, to transform them into the best version of yourself.
