What’s Fuelling You and What’s Draining You?

14 Aug

We had a smaller Men’s Group at The Healing Barn this week, with five of us there for the evening. The topic was What’s Fuelling You and What’s Draining You? As usual, we started there and then wandered through all sorts of different conversations. At times I was sitting there wondering how the hell Plato’s cave, dating, fishing, monkeys, a guy fucking a goat, project management and kids building a robot were all going to fit back into the topic.

Strangely enough, by the end of the night they did. Not because every story gave us a neat example of something that fuels us or drains us, but because they all started exposing the little patterns underneath our everyday lives. Sometimes it isn’t the job, the relationship, the kids or the situation that is draining us. It is what we are doing internally in response to it.

Are we only seeing the shadows on the wall?

The evening started with Plato’s cave, and that metaphor seemed to sit quietly underneath a lot of what we talked about afterwards. The basic story is of people who have spent their entire lives tied up inside a cave, only able to see shadows projected onto the wall in front of them. Because those shadows are all they have ever known, they believe that is reality. Eventually someone gets free, goes outside and discovers this whole world that had existed beyond the cave all along, but when he returns and tells the others what he has seen, they struggle to believe him because their entire experience tells them the shadows are real.

That took us into conversations around music, media, healthcare and the different systems we all live within. Every system has structures around it. There are rules about what gets funded, what gets promoted, what gets played, what gets recognised and what fits within the accepted pathway. That doesn’t necessarily make those systems good or bad, but I think it becomes limiting when we start believing that what we can see inside the system is all there is.

That is where lack can creep in. We start telling ourselves, this is my only option, I can’t do that, they won’t let me, I have to wait for somebody else, there isn’t another way. But what if there is another doorway that you simply haven’t seen yet? Sometimes we become so attached to the way we think something has to happen that we can’t see anything beyond it. Letting go doesn’t necessarily mean letting go of what you want; sometimes it means letting go of how you think you have to get there, which creates enough room for another possibility to show itself.

Are you chasing it or attracting it?

From there we somehow found ourselves talking about dating and connection. There is a big difference between a conversation where both people are interested and contributing, and one where it feels like pulling teeth. If you are constantly asking the questions, trying to keep things moving and manufacturing the connection while getting very little back, at some point it is worth simply noticing what is happening rather than immediately trying harder to make it work.

That led into a conversation about chasing versus attracting. When we chase love, approval, connection or any other outcome, there can be something underneath it saying, I need this person or this thing to give me something I don’t currently have. When we work on ourselves and become more settled in who we are, there can be less need to force the connection. We can notice what meets us and what doesn’t without automatically turning it into something we have to fix.

There was a mirror in this conversation too. It is very easy to look across at somebody else and see exactly what they need to work on. Maybe they want somebody to rescue them, carry them or fill a space they haven’t learnt how to fill themselves. That observation might even be completely accurate, but the more interesting question is: if I can see that so clearly in them, what might this be showing me about me?

There is another side to that as well. Getting to a place where you are genuinely content on your own can be really healthy, particularly if you have previously been overly attached to somebody else. But it is still worth being curious about whether you are genuinely comfortable on your own or whether disconnection has simply become safer than connection. Sometimes “I don’t need anybody” is freedom, and sometimes it is protection. There doesn’t need to be a judgement around either one; it is simply useful to know which one you are actually experiencing.

When three fish were enough

Then came a story about a fisherman who went out each day in his little boat and caught three fish. Three fish were enough. He had what he needed, came home and was happy. Then somebody came along and suggested that if he put a motor on the boat he could catch six fish, sell the extra three and the motor would eventually pay for itself. It sounded like a pretty good idea, so he did it.

Before long somebody else suggested a bigger boat. With a bigger boat he could travel further, catch twelve fish and make even more money. Eventually the little boat had become a large trawler catching hundreds of fish. There were employees, wages, maintenance, bigger bills and more responsibility, and he was spending far more of his life at sea. From the outside he had become much more successful, but somewhere along the way he had stopped being happy.

The funny part of the story is that he had been happy when three fish were enough. It is so easy to spend our lives living through I’ll be happy when... When I earn this much, then I can relax. When the business gets to this size, then I’ll slow down. When I buy this thing or achieve this goal, then I’ll finally feel like I have enough. Except the definition of enough has a habit of moving as soon as we get there.

Sometimes doing more serves another purpose as well. If I keep working, fixing, helping, achieving and finding the next thing to do, I never have to sit still long enough to notice what is happening underneath all of that busyness. What looks like ambition from the outside can sometimes be a very effective way of avoiding ourselves.

There was another part of the fisherman story that really stood out to me: it wasn’t even his idea that he needed more. Somebody else kept telling him what success should look like, and he kept running with their idea. That brings up a question that is probably worth asking every now and again: Is the life I’m working so hard to build actually the life I want, or is it somebody else’s idea of what a successful life should look like?

Why aren’t the monkeys climbing the ladder?

Another metaphor that came up was the story of five monkeys, a ladder and a banana. The story goes that whenever one of the monkeys tries to climb the ladder to reach the banana, they get blasted with water. Eventually they all learn not to climb the ladder. Then one monkey is replaced, and when the new monkey naturally heads towards the banana, the others stop him.

One by one the monkeys are replaced until eventually none of the monkeys left in the cage has ever actually been sprayed with the hose, yet they still stop each other from climbing the ladder. None of them knows why anymore. They simply know you don’t climb the ladder. Whether you take the story literally or simply as a metaphor doesn’t really matter; the useful part is what it points towards.

How many things are we still not doing because at some point we learnt that we couldn’t? Maybe the hose really was there once. Maybe something happened and the belief made complete sense at the time. But what if the environment has changed? What if the hose was turned off years ago and nobody has bothered checking?

That brought us straight back to Plato’s cave again. How much of what we believe about ourselves and the world is actually true for us now, and how much have we simply seen, heard or repeated so many times that we stopped questioning it? Sometimes the thing stopping us isn’t what is actually possible. It is what we have learnt to believe is possible.

And then there was Gary...

One of the stories that got a good laugh was about Gary, the local builder. Gary is sitting in the pub saying, “I built all those shops in town. Does anybody call me Gary the Shop Builder? No. I built the fountain everyone loves. Do they call me Gary the Fountain Builder? No. I even built the bloody school. Does anybody call me Gary the School Builder? Nope. But you fuck one goat...”

And suddenly you’re Gary the goat fucker.

It is ridiculous, which is probably why it works so well, but there is something very real hiding underneath the joke. We can do hundreds of things throughout our lives, yet somehow one mistake, one embarrassing moment or one thing we regret can become the thing we think defines us. Other people might even keep bringing it up simply because they think it is funny, but if it still hurts every time they say it, perhaps the bigger question isn’t why they keep mentioning it. Maybe it is why does this still hook me?

Another story came up about someone spending hours rowing on a river while some people sat up at a house overlooking the water cooking bacon and hash browns on the barbecue. Something was yelled down, something was yelled back, and then came the thought that actually, after four hours of rowing, sitting up there eating bacon and hash browns sounded pretty bloody good.

Nothing about the situation had changed, but the perception had. We can spend enormous amounts of energy resisting somebody else’s opinion of us, replaying an argument or trying to prove that something from our past doesn’t define us. The more desperately we resist it, the more energy we can sometimes give it. There can be a lot more freedom in being able to say, Yep, that happened. I can own it. It still isn’t who I am.

What if it isn’t your problem to solve?

One of the conversations towards the end of the night probably showed the draining pattern more clearly than anything else. Imagine being given a complicated project at work with an already tight timeframe. Then the materials turn up late and, rather than the completion date being pushed out, somebody decides they actually want it finished earlier. Immediately the mind starts running: How the hell am I going to make this work?

Then another project comes along that looks similar on paper and has roughly the same timeframe, except when you actually look at it, it is considerably simpler. Fewer components, less detail and fewer things that can go wrong. The two projects may have the same name, but they are not really the same job at all. Yet if you automatically take ownership of every expectation that gets handed to you, the pressure becomes yours to somehow solve.

Now take that same pattern home. Imagine your kids arrive with a random collection of bits and pieces and announce that they are going to build a robot. You look at what they have and there is no logical way you can see those pieces becoming a robot, so your mind immediately starts trying to solve the problem. When you can’t work it out, frustration starts to creep in.

But what if the answer is simply, “Cool. Show me how you think this becomes a robot.” Suddenly you don’t need the answer. You aren’t being asked to build the robot at all; maybe you are simply being invited to be curious about what somebody else can see.

The same thing can happen at work. Instead of quietly accepting an impossible collection of expectations and then carrying the responsibility for somehow making them all happen, maybe the questions become: What actually matters here? If the deadline moves, what else needs to change? What resources do we have? What is somebody else responsible for? Problem-solving can absolutely be something that fuels us. Believing we have to solve every bloody problem that gets put in front of us is something completely different.

So what was actually draining us?

As the evening went on, I was mentally filing all of these conversations away and trying to work out how Plato’s cave, dating, three fish, monkeys, Gary and his unfortunate goat, project management and a robot all fitted into What’s Fuelling You and What’s Draining You? Then I noticed that trying to make all of it fit perfectly was starting to drain me. I was doing exactly what we had just spent part of the evening talking about: trying to solve something that perhaps didn’t need solving.

Maybe the answer wasn’t that every story had to fit neatly underneath the theme. Maybe all of these stories were simply showing us the little places where our energy disappears without us noticing. Sometimes it is chasing something that isn’t meeting us back. Sometimes it is believing we need more when what we already had was enough. Sometimes it is living by a rule nobody has questioned for years, carrying a label we are still trying to prove wrong, following someone else’s idea of success, or automatically picking up responsibility for a problem that was never entirely ours.

None of those things necessarily looks massive on its own. In fact, we might blame something completely different and say, my job drains me, my kids drain me, relationships drain me, people drain me. But perhaps the thing itself isn’t always the drain. Maybe it is the pattern underneath it: chasing, proving, rescuing, controlling, resisting, pleasing, solving and continually trying to force life into the shape we think it should have.

That brought me back to another idea we have talked about recently: Are you moving towards what you genuinely want, or are you mainly trying to get away from what you don’t want? You could describe that as pleasure versus pain, but I think you could also describe it as abundance versus lack.

Lack tends to sound like I need more, I need them to change, I have to solve this, I can’t do that, I need to prove myself, I can’t have what I want because... Abundance is often much quieter. It sounds more like What do I actually want? What is enough for me? Is this even mine to carry? What else might be possible? What happens if I stop forcing the answer and become curious instead?

Maybe what fuels us isn’t always another thing we need to find or add to our lives. Sometimes it starts by becoming aware of all the subtle places where we are already giving our energy away, and then deciding whether we actually want to keep doing that.

That seems like a pretty good place to start.

Scott Holdem
The Healing Barn

Helping heal the mind, body and soul by bringing awareness to the patterns beneath the problem, so you can reconnect with yourself and move forward.

Scott Holdem