What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do Anymore

Nothing to do. I’ll be honest with you… The truth is, there’s nothing to do. And there’s a deep wisdom in letting things be. More than you think. Actually, don’t trust what you think. Trust what you feel. What you feel is real, and you came here to live that emotion. What you think may be just an interpretation, a cognitive offshoot of some assumed truth you can’t really rely on anyway.

Moments of despair, when we feel lost and unanchored, are turning points. The soul contracts so it can expand again.

I’ve lived through hard times. I’ve stared darkness in the face more times than I can count. And every time I hit a wall, I realized I had actually run into myself. Into the voices inside me that weighed me down, held me back, turned against me. And you know what? The darkness stared back. But over time, it became familiar. It stopped scaring me. Only then did I begin to see the light.

So what did I do? Counterintuitive as it sounds… I surrendered.

I leaned back, let my body give way, and said:

“You know what? Do whatever you want with me. I won’t fight you.”

Because there’s no point tilting at windmills. You can lie to yourself, sure. But shadows are called shadows precisely because they’re inner projections we haven’t metabolized. Not yet digested. Not yet accepted.

My Taoist teacher used to say that darkness doesn’t take hold of us through big, dramatic things. It takes hold through ordinary routines.
We could practice so much more, and we don’t. We could eat better, and we reach for something else. We put off until tomorrow what we could do today. We worry more than we meditate.

Not fighting your shadows doesn’t mean letting them run your day.

The real problem is something else: we live as if we’re immortal. As if we had all the time in the world. We don’t. We’re mortal, in this body of flesh and bone, with a brief window of time here, on this plane. And we’re wired in a strange, paradoxical way: we only truly value what we feel we’re missing.

So go to the mirror right now. Look at yourself the way you’d look at someone you love, seeing them for the very last time, and say:

“This is the last time I’ll see you.”

Say goodbye. And keep going.

The day ahead might just be the most beautiful day of your life.

Healing Your Inner Child

I’ve given many of my students a simple practice to work with. And I’ve watched it change lives.

We start from one premise: much of our suffering comes from painful experiences we absorbed without ever choosing to. Experiences that quietly write our future.

Your brain doesn’t draw as clear a line between what was and what will be as you might think. Neuroscience shows that we imagine the future using largely the same network we use to remember the past. Harvard researchers Daniel Schacter and Donna Rose Addis used brain imaging to show that the same regions light up when we recall an event and when we imagine a future one. What’s more, patients with damage to the hippocampus, who can no longer recall their past, also struggle to imagine their future in any detail.

In other words: we build our future out of pieces of our past. And if the past is still afraid, the future we imagine will carry the same fear.

Now, the practice. Which, by the way, actually works.

Every evening, sit in the center of your room.
Place your hand on your heart.
And talk to your inner child in a warm, grown-up voice.
Stay close. Tell them exactly what they need to hear.

Every time, I saw my inner child the same way: afraid of the dark, curled up, rigid.
Until I gave that child what it had been looking for all along.
Safety.

“I see you. I’m here with you. Everything’s going to be okay.”

Night after night, the same words.
And slowly, I came back to myself. For real.

Shake a Little. Change a Lot.

That Shakin' Guy