HOW DO YOU LIVE? Channel
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In this episode Mark explores the big question - 'How do you live?'
Mark Matousek is a bestselling author, teacher, and speaker whose work focuses on personal awakening and creative excellence through transformational writing and self-inquiry.
Transcription:
When I was 21 years old and my older sister came to visit me one day. She was thirty and she had always been my role model when I was growing up. She is the person who really took care of us, my mother wasn’t the mothering type and Marshall was a very sweet, big hearted person but she suffered from depression and a few days before her coming to see me her husband had left her and she was suicidally depressed. She had been hospitalised but the hospital let her out early because insurance wouldn’t cover it and we are all very very worried about her and one day she show up at my house just looking terrible and I said: “what is it Marsha? What is it?”. She wouldn’t talk to me at first, she kept avoiding the question and finally she said: “how do you do it?” and I said: “do what?” and she said: “how do you live?”. I didn’t know what to say to her and I thought about it and I come up with some platitudes: you know... you have to put one foot in front of the other you just have to... what’s the choice, what’s the alternative and all kinds of things like that and nothing got through and she just sort of gave a kiss and left my house and that was the last time that I saw her alive. Two weeks after that she killed herself…and so for me that became an emblematic experience, it became a life changing experience because I didn’t know what to tell her. And of course I couldn’t have saved her life but there is always the thought that had I had some words of inspiration for her, had I been able to give her some guidance, maybe that day she wouldn’t have done what she did. So the question “how do you live?” really became my mantra, really became my North Star in my life. The thing that guided me in my writing as well as in my personal life because when I was in my late 20s I received a what was believed to be a fatal diagnosis so the question “How do you live?” became very urgent for me and all of the sudden I couldn’t think about anything else. I left my job, I went to India, I started meditating, I started seeking a spiritual path because I realised until I answer that question “how do you live?” for myself I wasn’t going to be able to get through this very very scary time. For 10 years I was waiting to die and as anyone knows, who has been through a crisis, once the initial shock passes you have to figure out how to get through the next day, you know, you have to figure out how you gonna make it until there is some resolution or some light. Even crisis, even terror has a shelf life and I had to figure out when that passed, how I was going to find my way through and so for me it was about spiritual seeking, it was about looking for meaning in life but the key insight that came out of all of that seeking wasn’t finding God - I’m an agnostic. It wasn’t about having any prominent, lasting enlightenment or illumination. The major insight that came to me through all of my study and all of my practice was that suffering has a purpose, that in fact the adversity and challenges that come to us in our lives are exactly what we need to wake up from the story of ourselves.
Until we have this story, this fiction of self, this safe life myth cracked open by some kind of crisis or some kind of catastrophe, something it turns out around, we move through our lives believing that the story is us. That this fiction is real and that we are trapped inside it as this little I, this small personality that needs all of these things exactly to be as they are in order to survive. When in fact, what happens when your story cracks, is you realise that you’re not the story. That what you are and who you are is much much bigger than this myth that you’ve carried around of yourself and that there is actually… that it’s the crack in everything, that Leonard Cohen talks about, that lets the light in. So whatever it takes to crack your life open is exactly where grace enters your life. It’s exactly the open door into a new way of living and what I discovered is that when you realise that suffering has a purpose it turns around the depressive view of life as just being this thing that we have to bear and we realise that the darkness is there to wake us up. Otherwise we go through our lives in a trance of complacency or a trance of self ignorance but when this life cracks open and you begin to see the path of freedom out of this small self, your life takes on a whole different meaning… and what I would’ve said to Marsha that day - how do you live - how you live is by stopping looking backward and moving forward into the future.
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