Recently, my husband and I are talking about how in his golf league one Tuesday, he noticed fear around making a certain shot. We went on to talk about how bizarre it is that we make things like a golf game a matter of life and death just by the thoughts we create.

Obviously, a bad shot is not dangerous to one’s survival or well-being, but how often do we behave as if it is? How often do we use our mind and all of the thinking we do, to generate a real experience in the body of threat, when no real threat exists?

For starters, your body does not know the difference between real and imagined thoughts. We’ve all had the experience of whipping ourselves up by thoughts of worry and anticipation; enough to create an experience of unease in the body. And even illness. We can keep ourselves from sleeping with our made-up thoughts. Thought patterns can impact our mood, how we eat and how we relate.

As they say, “Perception is everything.” Interestingly enough, we can perceive what is real and true. Or we can perceive made-up stuff.

That’s why I spend so much time being mindful of what I am thinking. I have seen the direct link between my thoughts, my health and how it feels to be alive. Which is why, after the conversation with my husband, I started to watch my own mind even closer; paying attention to where I was creating self-generated fears. All of the ways, on a daily basis, that I make something feel life-threatening just by thought alone.

It can be so small and so mundane, so familiar and so conditioned, that we don’t even notice ourselves doing it. Like fretting about things we cannot control. Like what the weather is going to do when we have plans to be outside. Like imagining worse case scenarios in a difficult conversation. Like wanting something to go a certain way so badly that we feel as though if it doesn’t, something really bad is going to happen.

The day after my husband and I had this conversation, I found myself in one of those loops. Creating fears over whether something went this way or not. In the midst of the fear barrage, I heard:

“Stop making things a problem, that are not a problem.”

There are so many reasons why we make up problems. It gives us a rush to fix them. It’s how we were raised. It’s how we have consciously or unconsciously convinced ourselves that we will be safe. It’s part of living in a culture that pathologizes everything. We are marketed to in this way to get us to buy someone else’s solution. On and on it goes.

But maybe we don’t always need to know the origins of our problem-making tendencies. That alone is never the fix anyway. Maybe we just need to train ourselves to be present enough to notice when we are making something up and then to ask ourselves, “Am I pretending this is a problem when there is not even a problem here?” And then see where that takes us.

I wake recently with a knot in my stomach. I take a moment to wonder about it. I realize it’s linked to the fact that I’m subbing a yoga class for a beloved yoga teacher and I’m worried about how I’m going to be received.

As I stay with the sensation in my gut, all the thoughts related to the knot start to show up, and they all boil down to one theme: If someone doesn’t like what I am offering or what I am doing, it means something bad about me. I didn’t do it right. I’m not competent. What I offer is not valued.  

I think you get the picture.

Miraculously, in the midst of all this going on, and all the techniques I am using to try and make this feeling go away, I hear the words, “The greatest cause of all your suffering, as well as the confusion you create in the world, is believing that someone else’s reaction to you, is who you are.”

In an instant, this Truth cuts right through to the very heart of it. Who needs techniques to try and make something go away when you don’t even believe in the so-called problem to begin with? Like a sharp blade this knowing cuts through all the mental, physical, and emotional attachments I have to the story that in order to be here, I have to make sure others never think ill of me.

Let’s hope it can last.

This personal experience reflects what I see when I look out into the world; especially since the times of co-vid, and especially since the inception of social media where our relationships have been commandeered by a kind of “false presentation, tell-all and then risk annihilation by the mob if they don’t like your brand,” set of rules. I see a life-depleting and dangerous arrangement that has risen up between us based on some fundamentally destructive agreements, tacit though they may be.

Specifically around, Do as I say, Do as I want you to. Or else. Or else you will be cancelled. Or else you will lose your job and the right to be with your family. Or else you will be labeled as a…(fill in the blank). There is a real sickness between us now that has got many of us walking on eggshells; fearing we will be banished, attacked or deemed uncaring if we choose to go another way.

To be sure our social connections can reflect back to us important codes of conduct that help inform us about how to behave with one another. But somewhere along the way a grotesque mob mentality has taken over with the mandate being to suppress and make wrong the full and unique expression of each one of us.

Our social groups lose more than can be counted when we are afraid to be ourselves. Afraid to express an opinion not in line with the ideology du jour. Afraid to act on our own behalf when the group has gone mad.

If you doubt this in yourself, if you don’t see the way you will diminish yourself to belong or the way you will confuse who you are with another’s opinion of you, watch yourself as you move through your day. How often do you say or agree to something that you do not believe in? How often do you smile, as if in agreement, when you definitely do not agree? How many of us took a shot we did not want because we felt pressured by the group?

And how many of us are seeing all kinds of things in the world that are pathological, but keep our mouths shut for fear of social retribution?

Who you are can never be reduced down to what another thinks of you. To spend your life adjusting yourself to keep anyone from ever not liking you or what you’re doing is to add more confusion to an already very confused world.

Last night in the program I offer called The Healer Within, we were working with a principle of health and healing I refer to as “Breaking from a sick herd.” In preparing for class, it occurred to me this is likely the first time in our specie’s history that in a very large scale way, we must go against our own neurological wiring that pulls, even demands on a survival level, that we stay in connection with one another. That we look to one another for our cues around what to want and how to live. No matter how sick those cues might be.

But here we are. Living in a world that has made what is sick and distorted the norm. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes has a phrase for this: Normalizing the abnormal. But it is not normal that one in three of us will be diagnosed with cancer. It is not normal that so many of our young people are killing themselves or that our biggest upcoming health crisis according to the WHO will be depression and anxiety. It is not normal that we sit together in front of screens watching violence, gore and profane sexuality.

And it is most certainly not normal that we are passing this all along to our children: Giving them the message that this is as good as life gets.

We want to be together. We need to be together. It does not feel safe emotionally, psychologically or physically to imagine ourselves not within the protection of the families we grew up with and the groups we associate with now. But as much as we want to belong, what happens when these groups are sick? What happens when the larger culture has been created in such a way that we are directed towards what harms us?

Whether it’s all the ads that would have us believe that buying stuff is our highest contribution in life. Or the endless amounts of foods laden with chemicals (and now mRNA technologies) that we are forced to consume. Or the constant push to medicate ourselves recreationally or pharmaceutically against the modern day self-created illnesses and the malaise of living an empty existence.

I know well, from growing up in alcoholism, what it does to mind, body and spirit to be embedded in a sick herd. All of my attempts to stay connected to them came at great personal cost in terms of health, self-esteem and the call of my own soul. It took years to break from the sickness, the fall out was great, and I am still working on it.

But what I know to be true is this: Never should even one of us ever negotiate away the preciousness of our own life to stay in connection with another. Never should we trade our own health and possibility for the false promise of any of this being as good as it gets.