When it feels like the gods are against you

Greetings and Salutations!

In this week’s newsletter I want to talk about a challenge we all face from time to time—the feeling of being handed an unfair fate.

In my own life, the time I combated these feelings the most was when I left the monastic life. You see, even though I came to realize it was time for me to leave, there was so much about the life that I loved: the simplicity, the community, the sense of doing meaningful work.

It might sound funny because I was a monk, but it was the sad end to all of my hopes, plans, and dreams. It felt like everything I worked for for 16 years went up in flames.

Also, as I’ve explained in previous emails, I didn’t exactly have a smooth exit.

All of that put me in a place where I struggled with the cards that life dealt me. I felt like how is it that I worked so hard for something that all fell apart?

And why did it go up in flames in such a brutal way?

The Gods Are Against Me Syndrome

While the situation of leaving monastic life is probably hard for most people to relate to, the feeling that life has conspired against you and shattered your dreams in some way is a struggle that we all go through.

In the times when your life gets turned upside down, you can even feel that you’ve been personally selected to suffer an unfair punishment.

I call this, The Gods Are Against Me Syndrome.

These feelings are especially understandable if you’re contending with one of the major challenges of life, like having a serious illness, losing a loved one, or undergoing intense financial distress.

A struggle with the cards life dealt you can also take the shape of enduring a societal injustice that you’re burdened with, like being a minority. You struggle with the question: why was I born into a situation where I had to endure this?

I’m not minimizing real struggles here. Nor am I dismissing the reality of injustices in this world that must be fought.

I’ve just seen enough people undergoing hardship find the peace within themselves to know where the path forward lies.

The same challenge on a smaller scale

The struggle with fate that I’m talking about here can also take the shape of frustration with lots of smaller elements in life that feel out of your control.

It might be that you feel stuck in a job you don’t really like but for whatever reason you believe you don’t have any other options at the moment.

Or you might have some kind of health problem that is not necessarily life-threatening but you feel like you’ve just been sentenced to endure this pain, like being cursed with slow metabolism or a bad knee.

Or you might struggle financially and you don’t see any way out of the situation, despite all your attempts to get ahead.

Such issues can overshadow all the positive elements of our life and we can lose sight of all the blessings we have.

If you take a moment right now and ask yourself how satisfied you are with the different aspect of your life, you might be surprised at how many things you struggle with in your life—about all the areas of life where you ask, why me? What have I done to deserve this? Why aren’t things easier for me?

The fantasy of perfection

One reason it’s so easy to feel like fate has done us wrong is that we all carry with us an idealized view of what we want life to be like—a cluster of hopes and dreams that we internalized as children when we couldn’t tell the difference between movies and reality and therefore we thought life could unfold like it does on television.

As a result, in the back of our minds, we measure life against a fantasy.

We have dreams for how we want life to unfold: our love life, our family life, our careers, our finances, the communities we are a part of.

They’re not rational and they’re not realistic—but they’re deep-rooted.

Because the idea of perfection was always an illusion, many people who actually achieve their fantasy wind up in real trouble because the inner fulfillment is lacking. You see this all the time with the rich and famous.

The secret to moving beyond the syndrome

As with all the mental states I call Syndromes of the Lost Self, the solution to The Gods Are Against Me Syndrome is to pry beneath the surface.

You see, the vast majority of negative emotions that cloud our consciousness are simply not resolvable on their own. We get convinced that they are the real problem. We devote a ton of energy trying to resolve them as if they were the real problem. But the real problem is elsewhere.

The true problem that’s causing this syndrome dwells in a place I call the Garden of Vulnerability.

Now here’s the thing. Lots of people would prefer to rail against their fate—hopeless as that is—rather than enter the Garden of Vulnerability. In fact, lots of people would prefer just about anything rather than enter that garden.

The even more important thing is this: while it’s not exactly fun to be in the Garden of Vulnerability, once you muster the courage needed to enter that sacred space, you will find it has a richness, a beauty, and a connection to God that far surpasses the fantasy of perfection we’re all chasing after.

I started with my own example of feeling hard-done-by in the way my life as a monk came to a close. When I went below those surface feelings, I discovered a host of other feelings I didn’t want to encounter.

I found tremendous grief, feelings of failure, fears about my future, and many other challenging emotions.

When I allowed these feelings to surface, and when I tended to them one by one—through the process I now call the Self Salutation—I was able to shake myself free of the cloud of frustration that hung over me and pursue the task of building my new life with happiness and vigor.

The deeper fulfillment is always possible

There’s one more key that I want to share with you which may help you if you find yourself stuck in The Gods Are Against Me Syndrome.

Life is not asking you to give up an experience of fulfillment, even though that may seem to be the case. It’s almost always just asking you to relinquish a particular way of attaining that fulfillment.

We’re fundamentally wired to view the “successful life” as the one in which we get everything we want—and we get it in the specific way we want it.

We lose sight of the fact that a dream is just a tactic for attaining the greater goal of fulfillment.

In reality, the fulfillment that will truly satisfy the soul is an experience of love, connection, and contribution that has little to do with the external circumstances captured in the televised version of perfection.

That satisfaction you seek can still be yours for the taking—you just have to enter the Garden to find it.

Peace,
Simon

P.S. In case you missed it, I’ve done a few podcasts recently that I want to invite you to check out:

1. I spoke with Catherine Rodriguez on the Cycle Podcast about Mindfulness, meditation, and what it was like to be a monk. You can listen to it here.

2. I also spoke with Valeria Teles on the Fit for Joy Podcast about “Why self-love beats perfectionism any day.” You can listen to it here.