Relax, Everything is Out of Control

Gabor Maté, a renowned addiction, trauma, and child development expert, was on Russell Brand’s podcast recently and in it he spoke of a Buddhist teaching that hit home so deeply that I had to share. He said:

“In the West everyone says, ‘panic, panic, everything is out of control.’ In the Buddhist world they say, ‘relax, everything is out of control.’”

Let that sink in. The same situation, two different perspectives. There is no right or wrong one, there is just the one we choose, the one we allow to be the motor that runs our lives.

Humans are warriors, we are wired to survive. We are good at seeing threats, too good actually. While this survival instinct may have been helpful in the past (like thousands of years ago kind-of-past), we need to let our fight or flight instincts take a back seat.

In the West, we believe that in order to remain calm and danger-free we need to control every last thing around us. We’ve gotten really good at minimizing our discomfort levels and chaperoning every last detail of our lives.

In the process of ensuring our survival, we’ve stopped our own evolution. We’ve cut ourselves off from ourselves.

Our tolerance for discomfort has increased so much that a majority of deaths in the United States happen from deaths of despair, that is deaths from opioid overdoses, suicides, and cirrhosis of the liver. What is the throughline? Stress. In fact, life expectancy in the US has actually decreased due to deaths of despair. We’ve gotten so great at avoiding our feelings that we have brought ourselves deeper into pain.

So if control does not actually bring us greater peace, what does?

Neurologists Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Walman say that having an accurate perception of reality is not one of the brain’s strong points and that the brain does not even try to create a fully detailed map of the external world.

When the truth of uncertainty is more acutely in our face and we are exposed to just how much control we have, we panic.

Are we panicking because shit has hit the fan? Or are we panicking because the fog is being wiped away from our eyes?

If we find ourselves getting sucked into the frequency of the chaos, know that the remedy does not arrive when this moment ends. The remedy arrives when we surrender to truth.

In the realm of control and perfection, there is no room for humanity, there is no room for our spirits to guide us. In the world of control and perfection, there is a hyper-focus on everything that is wrong.

We’ve been given the gift of looking in the mirror and seeing the truth. Are we going to get lost in our egoic reactions and allow our triggers to control us? Or are we going to proceed with humility and surrender to what is? Are we here for our fears or are we here for our truth?