Episode Transcript
We Americans enjoy a wonderful and powerful way of life, but internally and in relationships, we may wish for better. Join me as we look beneath the surface and gain insights to transform every aspect of your life. My name is Dr. Ann O'Hare, and this is The Spiritual American. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Spiritual American. My name is Dr. Anne O'Hare and I am your host. And today we're going to talk about another red pill. We talked about a red pill the other day, the red pill of karma. And as I was contemplating what I could talk about in this episode, I thought of another red pill we can look at. And we're going to get into that in just a minute. But before we do, please, If you like this content and you find value in it, please like, share, and subscribe. It helps reach out to more people if we do that. And also please share with your family and friends because it's good to, that they can get benefit as well. So what's the other red pill that we're going to talk about today? So I want to do a disclaimer first. What I'm about to say may sound a little controversial, because even when we did the red pill of karma, again, the whole idea of a red pill is that you're going to see something newly and that you can't unsee it. So the red pill this time is the price of success. What is the cost of being successful? And have I paid the price? So we're going to look at this and again, it might seem a little controversial, but the only thing I'm suggesting is take a look and see if what I'm going to share now makes some kind of sense and if it can be a value, if we can turn it around. With the red pill of karma, we talked about being a hundred percent responsible for our life. So in this case, the price of success, I'm going to start by saying that one of the prices of success. could be one of the symptoms that we have, um, successful people that aren't happy. Let's say, so some people are very successful and they're very confident and whatever, but there are people that are successful in their lives. Like, and this is what this podcast is for people who are outwardly successful, have it all supposedly, but inside they're not happy. Is something not right? So I wrote down a couple of words here, try to describe what I'm talking about. Outer success, inner laziness, outer focus, inner loneliness, and then outer knowledge and inner neglect. So what I'm suggesting is that we can look at things like anxiety, depression, unhappiness, Frustration, uh, dissatisfaction with life, maybe also constantly trying to change something and get something new. We're always looking for some new scenario to try to fill up this inner situation that we have. And the reason why I call it the price of success is because I was talking to somebody the other day, and this is not the truth. But like I said, you can just. See if this makes sense to you, but if you're living, let's say you're living in a very, um, work, work oriented scenario. Let's say maybe there's not a lot of money or maybe look back in the past, like in the 18 hundreds when they were frontier frontier people and you know, you, you were. You know, getting water from the creek and you were chopping wood and it was all day, every day was working just to keep life going. I'm going to say there wasn't really an anxiety problem then. There wasn't really a depression problem then. There wasn't really as much of a problem with dying as there is now, like a fear of dying. People died left and right. Now, like I said, I want you to take what I'm saying within the context of a red pill, like, as I want us to see something maybe that we didn't see. What I'd like us to see is that if I am successful externally, but I am not Internally, if my mind is not in order or if my emotions are out of control, I'm not going to be happy. I know there's certain, I can give examples, but I don't want to point anybody out in particular. Maybe if you can think about somebody in your life, think of someone in your life, maybe who had a lot of education or who was very, let's say, outwardly, um, very competent in a certain area, but maybe emotionally they were arrogant or weak or, you know, they got angry a lot or something like that. Do you ever meet somebody who took care of all their responsibilities, but then they come home and they're abused, abusive to their family? What I'm suggesting is that all the work that we spend on the outer self, the outer part of our life, we need the price. Now the price of all that success is that we need to be responsible for our inner life too. The next podcast that I'm going to do, the next episode is called Confronting the Bully and the bully is anxiety. And I'm going to talk about that. And some of these episodes. You're going to hear me sound a little like psychology, maybe some of the things you've heard before, but some of them I'm going to try to push the boundaries here. So I'm going to try to push the boundary with this one right now. Consider that maybe if I'm like out of control emotionally, like let's say if I get angry and I'm sad and I feel anxious and whatever, that maybe I haven't been paying enough attention to my inner world. Maybe I'm paying too much attention to the outer world. Maybe I value it too much. Maybe I'm lazy, inner, inner laziness, in the sense that I let myself get away with things. One example, I'll give one little example. Again, this is a red pill conversation, so this is going to maybe be a little ouchy, you know. It's not going to be this, the red pill isn't about being nice. The red pill is about seeing something new, different. So one of the things that I started doing when I started doing spiritual practice is that I stopped doing this apologizing and then keep doing it. I don't know if you know that thing. You know, you fight, you get into an argument with someone, you say, Oh, I'm so sorry I yelled and whatever. And then two days later, you're back doing the same thing. And we, we see ourselves do it. We see other people do it. And we kind of have accepted that. This is what I mean by laziness. We've kind of accepted that, oh, they're just, this is part of life, that they're just going to be angry and they're going to fly off the handle and, and behavior is going to be like this and that. And then you're just going to apologize. And I expect an apology and then that's it. But then what's to stop them from doing it again? So what I'm talking about now is just as disciplined as we are on the outside, just as disciplined as I am with making sure that my clothes are right and making sure that my status is good and making sure all this stuff is on the outside, all the success, the outward success, I should be just as diligent on managing my own feelings, managing my own emotions, and I should be just as strong with that. So if I say, if I start yelling and, and things, and then I say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And this, I teach my son this now, if you say you're sorry, that means you're never doing it again. That's what that means. Because I don't want to hear in this, this is me being, um, disciplined with my emotional states. So I want to be disciplined with my emotional states. If I, if I find that I'm behaving in a certain way that I don't want to behave, I should make an effort to never do that again. So the price of success, success, meaning all of that energy done on the outside. All of this external focus and success, right? Because I'm managing it on the outside. Why do we allow ourselves to get emotionally unstable? Why do I allow myself to get angry? Why do I get sad? Why do I get, you know, anxiety? All these things. And by the way, again, as usual, there's a continuum, right? I'm not talking about the people who are really. you know, suffering very deeply, like clinically depressed, you know, massive anxiety, things like that when you're getting help. This, this, the one thing I can say about this that you can use is that you can tell yourself that eventually you would like to be able to be in control of it. This, this kind of goes against the way psychology sees things. It doesn't mean that I'm, that I can control it all the time, but it means that I'm taking responsibility for it. I'm talking about emotional states. The reason that I'm calling it the, the price of success is because I think sometimes we, we say, we think it's enough to make money or we think it's enough to focus on which car I have or whatever. And even nowadays, we're not even focused on that. We're just focused on getting, you know, living a comfortable life, let's say, or you know. having like normalcy, right? We're focused on that externally, but internally, am I that interested in stopping anger, for instance, or am I interested in stopping my sadness or stopping my anxiety? Do I want it to end? Do I even think that that's possible? How many times have we set a goal externally and gone over obstacles and tried everything we could to obtain those goals? So I think, thank you. In terms of what we can do about this, I wrote a couple of other things down, like, what happens to a dog when you don't exercise the dog? The dog starts ripping up the furniture and going crazy, right? What happens to kids when they have no activities? I know this for myself, when you have a young child, you have to give them something to do, otherwise they're going to start, you know, running around and maybe getting into dangerous situations. It's the same thing with the mind and our emotions. If we're not being disciplined and if we're not trying to manage our emotions, they're going to go crazy. And then the, the, the part that's distasteful to me now, which it wasn't before because I used to think it was normal, but the part that's distasteful to me now is that when people say, I'm sorry, and then they do it again. So what's that? Right? Right. Right. So this is, this is a piggyback onto the karma talk that we had, because in the karma talk, we were talking about how I'm a hundred percent responsible. So in this, this episode, I'm talking about, I'm a hundred percent responsible for my emotional states. It doesn't mean I can change them all, all at once. It doesn't mean everything's going to stop in two seconds. But at least I'm responsible and I'm responsible for my behavior too. We haven't been paying attention. We've been paying attention to external things. We haven't been taking responsibility for ourself emotionally. So one other thing I wrote here, the mind is like the genie, like the genie in the bottle. So the idea of the genie is that if you don't give the genie something to do, the genie is going to destroy you. It's not like Aladdin with Disney, but the idea of the genie is powerful. So the mind is very, very powerful. Emotions are very, very powerful. Why do we allow fights to happen? For instance, if I'm so successful and I'm so good and I'm such a good person and I have so much, uh, success and power and I've done so much, why am I allowing myself to act a certain way? I remember, um, as a young nurse, I remember, this could be any, I didn't, I didn't mention any professions before, but I'll just go with it. Give an example, I won't say what kind of person it was, but I was talking to this one person and this person got so frustrated with me that he threw the chart at me. And this was a six foot three, six foot three person. And he threw a chart at me because he was so mad that something didn't get done. And it just, it, this is a grown man, this is a grown adult acting like this. And he was, he was towering over me, right? So in that moment, my boss came out of her office and, you know, told him what for. But the point is, why did that person who was so successful in their profession and so in control and so able to do everything, why would they let themselves get so out of control emotionally? So the price of success is that I have to control my emotions. not control with force or what, there's a whole process we have to go through to control our emotions. But I'm just saying this is the red pill moment. The red pill moment is yes, I am responsible and I'm not going to be lazy and I'm not going to be ignorant and I'm not going to be irresponsible and I'm not going to blow it off and I'm not going to pretend like it's not happening. Think about the parent with the child that's letting the child act out. You get so frustrated with the parent, right? Why are they letting them do that? It's their responsibility to take care of the child. It's our responsibility to take care of our emotions. Why am I letting my emotions run my life? How many cultural norms have been built around this? Yelling at each other, fighting with each other, saying mean things to each other. Why do we normalize that? This is not the way we want to live, right? So the price of success is that I need to be in control of my emotional states. It's a process. It means there's going to be a lot of reflection. So what I wrote here, what do we do? So if I say, okay, I'm going to take the red pill of this. I'm going to take the red pill of my emotional responsibility. I'm going to take responsibility for my emotions. Period. Whatever it is. Anger, fighting, upset. Gossiping, whatever, sadness, depression, anxiety, anything. I'm going to, I'm a hundred percent responsible. A hundred percent like the red pill. Okay. Now what do I do? And I wrote down here, practice meditation, start meditating and get in touch with. your mind. And what we practice is Raj yoga meditation. So you can look in the description below. Um, there's the website, there's meditation videos there to practice, and there's the website to get in touch with. If you're interested to try getting in touch with one of our centers, all of our classes are free. Everything's free. In the Brahma Kumaris, everything is free, but to connect with people who are also meditating and be able to start the process of being responsible and healing and undoing some of that emotional turmoil. Did you ever meet someone who, I can give two examples right now of bosses, one boss was totally confident, was very gentle and nice and let us all do whatever we wanted as long as, you know, we told him what we were doing. And he said, great, go ahead. He was very generous. And, you know, and then I had another boss who was complete micromanaging, complete, you know, like the, what is the difference? Don't we want to be open and generous and happy with people and ourselves? Don't we want to be like that? Don't I want to be content in myself? Don't I want to feel relaxed in interactions? Don't I want to feel confident? Where does even the anxiety and depression come from? You know, in this case, I'm going to say right now, each of us is going to have to look and see right for ourselves. This is where meditation comes in and maybe therapy or whatever you want, psychology counseling, but take a look and say, I want to be responsible for my emotional states. And I'm going to say today that that's paying the price for what you did on the outside. When you meet someone who is powerful on the outside and very confident and appropriate and controlled emotionally on the inside, it makes you feel good about yourself. It engenders trust, it engenders good relationship, and it's really special when you meet people like that. So we want to be like that, right? So think about it. Is it possible that all the outer attention that I've had over this time, is it possible that I've neglected my own inner attention? Is it possible that I've become lazy? Is it possible that I've blamed other people for my emotions? Is it possible that I say I'm sorry and keep telling myself I'm not going to be like that and then I keep doing it? Well, who's going to stop me then? Don't I have to be responsible for myself? So think about that and consider maybe starting a meditation practice. to explore some of what's going on on the inside, the price of success. I did all this outer work. Well, now I have to do the inner work. And I'm going to say that maybe it sounds a little scary and maybe there's all kinds of thoughts going on in your mind right now about this. Maybe some resisting thoughts, whatever. You don't have to believe anything I'm saying. I'm just putting it out there as an idea. I can say for myself that taking responsibility for my emotions It feels better, even if it's not perfect yet. It just feels better because at least I know I'm getting better. At least I know I'm working on it. I'm the parent now that's parenting the child now. I'm the one that's giving the genie something to do. I'm walking the dog every day so the dog is well behaved, right? If I don't do that, the emotions are going to go wild. And the, the, the, the worst part about that, again, I'm saying it again, is when we don't take responsibility for it. That to me is the worst part. Why would you keep doing the thing after you know, well, we know why, because we're not paying attention to it and we're not taking responsibility. So I will leave it at that. Um, it sounds a little bit, you know, intense. It's only intense because I want it to be like, like a red pill, but think about it. Am I being responsible for my inner world, my emotions and my behavior? Or am I kind of flailing around with it and blaming something else and being helpless and kind of getting beaten by it? In the next episode, again, we're going to talk about anxiety as a bully. Some of these emotions feel like bully, right? We're getting bullied by them. So I would say, no, we don't have to. We can think about taking responsibility and looking at different ways to do that to help ourselves. Whether it be meditation, reflection, therapy, reading, you know, anything, any information is a good thing about the internet now we get all this information all the time, right? We can educate ourselves. So I'll leave it there. And so for your homework for this week, take a look and see, do I want to be, do I want to take the red pill of emotional responsibility for myself? I remember one time I'll leave you with this one time I had anxiety. I'm not going to say it's completely gone. But, uh, you know, I went like six years with no symptoms and then it came back and now it's gone again. So I, I, I've accepted that maybe it'll come back here and there. But I remember when I was really in the throes of it, a friend of mine said to me, you have to get mad at it. And it was like, why? Like it never occurred to me that I could actually fight back against this thing. So that's a, that's a little preview of the next episode, but I'll leave it there. And so remember our slogan is heal, empower, and serve. And it's serve because every time I get better, everyone around me and the whole world gets better too. So until next time, take care. You
