Episode 48: The Power of Meekness

Hello, podcast universe! Welcome to Episode 48 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and I feel so lucky to be podcasting today. How are you all? How is life where you are? I've been thinking about you, about all of us, about our world, and praying with you for relief. So here at our house to be honest it's a little bit boring and it's a little bit bedlam, right? All at the same time. It's 50/50. But none of us are sick and we are doing our best here to just keep on keeping on.

00:01:10:00 - 00:01:41:23
My kids are home from college and so now everyone is doing courses online and so at our house there are computers and laptops and books and papers and suitcases and clothing everywhere. And right now even, in order to find a little peace and quiet in the house, I'm recording from the floor of my son's bedroom closet. I keep thinking that I should probably stop and get everyone sorted out and everyone organized, but I think there's a part of me that just wants to keep believing that all of this is temporary and it's all going away soon.

All right. So before I start today I just want to tell you that you can do this. Whatever it is that you have to do right now, you can do it. You were made for this. Every storm runs out of rain and this one is going to run out of rain long before you run out of strength and faith. I believe in you and I am amazed by you. Every day I talk to clients who are managing their brains one day at a time and finding the grace and the joy and the gratitude in where they are right now. You can do this. Even when you think you can't. So keep going. You absolutely can.

And if you need a little more one-on-one help in the management of your very human brain, you can sign up for free coaching session and I'll help you feel better. As always you can do that at my website, aprilpricecoaching.com.

So I actually had an entirely different podcast planned for today and yesterday I even recorded it and I edited it. And then I woke up very early this morning, about an hour before my alarm went off and I had the thought that I need to talk to you about something else entirely.

00:02:50:29 - 00:03:07:18
So I hope that this will come together for you and for me. I wanted to give you a couple of practical tools that I think might be really useful to you right now and I hope this podcast today will give you some powerful things to think about and it will help you in your life where you find yourself right now.

So I know that for most of us this is one of the strangest times we have ever experienced—where on the one hand it is extremely stressful and challenging, and yet at the same time I find myself thinking like I shouldn't be stressed, this shouldn't be stressful, this shouldn't be hard. What is hard about staying put, right?

Like yesterday I just felt this heaviness that I couldn't shake. And yet there wasn't anything actually wrong in my life. David went to work as usual. I got to coach my amazing clients. I recorded a podcast. I made dinner with food that I had in my cupboard and my freezer. All of my kids were with me around the dinner table on a Tuesday night at the end of March, which is totally unusual and should feel like an incredible gift. The weather was beautiful. I had taken Auggie on a couple of walks.

And yet as I climbed in bed I really felt discouraged and down and a little hopeless. And I had that feeling where you just need a really good cry. And it's just so strange, right? Like nothing has really gone wrong. In fact I'm just here in my house with my kids, which in any other circumstance would feel like an incredible gift.

00:04:20:11 - 00:04:38:14
And then at the same moment my brain reminds me that I'm vulnerable and I could die at any moment or the people that I love are at risk and the world at large is really hurting. And I find myself kind of bouncing between these two extremes—where nothing is wrong and yet everything is wrong.

And for me it's really so powerful to watch the model at work in my life. And it's just more evidence for me that it really is my thoughts creating all of my feelings and not my circumstances. Because if I put all the facts out there and they notice all the actual things that are happening, there is nothing that we could even classify as negative or painful happening to me personally.

My life really hasn't changed that much. I didn't used to go out period. Like the only thing that's really negative is that Amazon is taking way longer than two days to get me my stuff. I don't even know anyone that's sick. And my kids are home, which for the last couple of years has been a rare occurrence. And so it's one of those things that I actually love and look forward to whenever it happens.

And so it just becomes so clear to me that it's always my thoughts that are creating my feelings. It's never what's actually happening in my life. It's always what I'm thinking about it. And last night all those feelings of hopelessness were created by my thoughts and nothing else that was actually happening in my life.

00:05:45:15 - 00:06:10:21
And this doesn't make them any less real, of course. This doesn't mean that they should just be discounted. It doesn't mean that my feelings aren't real and that they aren't happening. It's kind of like that line that J.K. Rowling writes in the final Harry Potter book and Harry asked Dumbledore if what's happening is real or if it's just all happened in his head and Dumbledore says, "Of course it's happening in your head Harry. But why on earth should that mean that it's not real."

Right? It is real. Our feelings are real and there are no feelings that you shouldn't be having or that you need a justifiable reason to have. Your feelings are real and they are actual physical vibrations happening in your body. But it's just good to know that you created them every time. And why does that matter? Because it means that I am never a victim of them or just at the effect of them.

My feelings are never just happening to me. Hopelessness cannot just like descend upon me. They are created by me and they can be changed by me. They exist in my body because of me, because of what I think. And they stay or go inside my body because of me because of what I think.

And I don't know exactly how you feel right now. For each of us that's probably different. But I do know that whatever you are feeling is created by your thoughts and nothing else.

00:07:10:13 - 00:07:27:06
And it's really interesting because what I've noticed over the last couple of weeks is how judgmental we are of those feelings. We are judgmental of ourselves and our own feelings. We don't know how to feel right now and we worry that maybe like there's a right way to feel and we probably are not doing it right.

And additionally we are also very judgmental of other people and their feelings and we for sure think we know how other people should feel. So this week when I've listened to coaching calls with my coaches, there are clients who are really, really mad at other people, that think they aren't taking the pandemic seriously, and they're not worrying enough, and they're feeling too nonchalant about all of it. They think all the other people in the world should feel worried and scared and should feel an obligation to stay home.

And then on the very same call you'll have clients who are upset because people are scared and worried and they shouldn't be. They think their loved ones shouldn't be at the effect of their fear and they shouldn't have anxiety or scarcity, that people shouldn't be thinking that they're never going to get toilet paper again, and they should be controlling their thoughts so that they don't feel anxious and nervous and concerned about the future.

Do you see? We kind of think there's a right way to feel. There's a right way for other people to feel and there's a right way for us to feel. And we even look around us at the experts to figure out how we should all be feeling and how other people should be feeling. And then we have lots of judgement of our feelings and other people's feelings when they don't line up with those.

00:08:35:13 - 00:09:09:25
And this is where I want to start today. What I want to offer you is that judging your experience and judging other people's experiences is a painful way to live because the judgment you have for yourself and for others is heavy. It is adding to your stress and discomfort right now. And as an option you can set all of that down. There isn't a right way to feel. There is actually an unlimited platter of emotions and not one of them is right and not one of them is wrong. They are all available to each of us and they are all allowed.

Remember that all of our feelings exist in our body because of what we think and all of the other people's feelings exist in their bodies because of what they think. And we get to choose our thoughts. And they get to choose theirs. That is their right. That is their agency and it is yours.

It's not your job to change other people's thoughts and feelings. If you want, of course, you can always offer another way to look at things. But whenever you think that they are doing it right or they are doing it wrong and then tying your own emotions to their choices, you increase your own suffering. And I want you to make sure that you understand that. Whenever you think that what other people are thinking or feeling or doing is right or wrong and then tying your emotional well-being to their choice, you don't change them. You only increase your own suffering.

So I want to talk about all of this today using a word that we don't use very often and I think it's a word that kind of has a negative connotation for many of us. In fact I even hesitated using it in the title of the podcast because I thought, "No one's going to want to listen to a podcast about 'meekness'," right? That's just not super attractive probably. But today I want to offer you the idea that one way to get more power over your own emotional life right now is to access and cultivate the attribute of meekness.

00:10:34:10 - 00:11:05:27
Okay, so before you give up on me, let me explain. I think that meekness is a way of viewing God and it's a way of viewing others. So as humans we think things should be a certain way. We think our life should go a certain way and we think that others should think and feel and behave in a certain way and we think we know what's right. But when we are being meek, we recognize that it's possible that we're wrong about that. It's possible that we don't know how life should go and it's possible that we don't know how others should be.

And the truth is we can never really know either of those things. We can't know how it's supposed to be and we can't know for sure what others should do. Ever. And when we think we do, we suffer. It's that simple.

So I want to give you three ways to apply meekness in your life right now to alleviate some of your unnecessary suffering. And let you set down some of the heaviness that you might be carrying around. Not that I think you should be meek but that I want you to know that you can be and that it will help you feel better.

So the first idea is to be meek when it comes to other people. And right away I think the human part of us was to even just like resist the sentence right? Because meekness, for many of us, implies a weakness and it implies that we're supposed to accept like "doormat status." But I actually think the opposite is true. I think that when you are meek you are at your most powerful.

00:12:04:28 - 00:12:26:23
When it comes to other people, being meek means that we don't know how they should be doing it. It means that we are tolerant of their thoughts and their feelings. It means we are humble enough to know that we don't know what other people should think. We don't know what other people should feel and we don't know how they should act.

Choosing to step out of their business and instead step into our own is really the most powerful you can be because you're suddenly dealing with the things that you actually have control over.

Okay, so I want to give you a little example of what this might look like and I realize that the examples I give you from my own life are like so insignificant in relation to like global pandemics, right? And you might be out there thinking that I am completely out of touch, but sometimes I can see these things easier in just the ordinary daily dramas of regular life. So I offer it to you in the hopes that it will help you.

00:13:04:20 - 00:13:21:13
So a couple of weeks ago my son got his wisdom teeth out and it was a painful experience for him, right? Now of course this was physical pain, but all of the things that happened in this story apply to emotional pain and suffering as well. And the emotional pain of the people that you love.

Okay, so anyway my son was in a lot of pain and he let me know that he was in a lot of pain. And really like I knew that it was going to be like this going in when I found out he had to get his wisdom teeth out because he does not have a high pain tolerance. Or at least he's just not quiet about his pain, right? (Which I actually think is a good thing, right? He gets relief faster than the rest of us because he just doesn't tolerate it or put up with it. He doesn't think that pain should be a part of his life and so he notices it when he's having it and he seeks relief.)

So I remember one time in fact when he was little and he scraped his knees up really badly playing football at school and he would get in the shower and he would just like scream so loud when the water hit those scrapes. And he would scream so loud I actually considered taking him to the emergency room, right? I thought, "He is dying in there."

Anyway, okay so now a week after he got his wisdom teeth out he was still regularly taking ibuprofen and Tylenol and icing his cheeks and complaining about the pain. And he asked me to call the dentist and see if there was something else that was wrong—why he was in so much pain.

00:14:36:04 - 00:14:40:18
So I asked him, "Okay, well what's your pain level? On a scale from 1 to 10."

And he said, "A three."

And I was like, "What?" Like a 3? All this rigamarole and you're at 3? I was like, "I live my life at a three, on a good day. 3 is just standard operating procedure for me." What is the problem with three, right?

Now notice what happened here and apply it to yourself and your own judgments of other people and their pain and their feelings. Okay so my son, in essence, was saying, "I'm having a feeling. I don't like I'm in pain," right? And then I judged him for that. My brain judged him and thought, "You shouldn't be feeling bad," Right? "You really shouldn't even be complaining about it. This is life. Buck up. We live at three. Three is a gift and a blessing, right? You don't know what real pain is like." I totally judged him for his pain, for seeing his life as painful.

00:15:43:15 - 00:16:12:07
And in the same way, we judge other people for their emotional experiences. And it's especially prevalent right now in our lives. We think that people shouldn't be complaining or we think more people should be complaining more so that we can stop this. We think that people shouldn't be upset or we think they aren't upset enough. We think people should be scared or we think they shouldn't be scared. We think we know how they should be doing it and what they should be feeling.

We think we know from our experience and from our thoughts what they should think what their experience should be. I thought my son should think he's lucky to be at three but that's only because of what I think and because of my experience. And who says I'm right about that? Maybe he's right and I shouldn't be satisfied living my life at a pain level of three.

My point is that I don't know what his experience should be and I never know what someone else's experience should be. This is where meekness serves me so well because I can recognize that I don't know and I can't ever know what someone else should think or feel, then I can just allow my son his experience. And I can set down all of my judgments and just love him and just help him where he is.

And that will feel so much better to me. It will make being his mother less heavy because I don't have to carry judgment along with me with all my other responsibilities. It will make me tolerant of his experience humble to let him have his own experience, whatever it is, and then allow me to access the highest parts of me to help him.

00:17:29:00 - 00:17:46:07
So here are some questions that can help you access meekness and dropped judgment for other people. The first one is: If I didn't think I was right, then what would I do? If I didn't think I was right about this, what could I let go of? What would I do then?

And the second one is kind of the reverse of that: If I knew they were right, what would change? Like if I knew they were right in the thoughts and feelings they were having, what would change for me?

So for me in that moment with my son it was really easy for me to see how my judgement of him was totally making my life harder. And it wasn't changing his experience. It wasn't changing his feelings about his pain. It wasn't changing his perception of it. Right? It was changing me and my ability to love him where he was.

If I knew that Ethan was right about how he was feeling, what would change for me? Well then I would offer compassion instead of judgment. I wouldn't try to change his experience, I would just say I'm sorry that you're feeling that way. I would drop into love and see what I could do to help. When this happens you just feel all of your defensiveness dissolve and then you're flooded by peace and love and compassion.

00:18:45:27 - 00:19:20:18
And you can apply this to the big things in your life right now. All the people on Facebook and on television and all the people in your family or your extended family, your neighbors that are all doing it wrong. You can just let that be and you could drop your defenses, drop your judgment and choose to be meek, and acknowledge that you don't know what they should think and feel and do. And this is a gift you give yourself. It's not even for them. It's for you—to make you feel better. It will change your feelings and alleviate your unnecessary suffering.

Okay, the second way that I want to give you that will help you apply meekness in your life is with yourself. So I want to invite you to drop your judgments about your own feelings and your own experience. You are always feeling what you're feeling because of your thoughts and all the thoughts are allowed. So many of our thoughts are just random response to stimulus and they're motivated simply by survival. They aren't an indictment of your character, or your lack of faith or your deficiencies.

So last night as I was feeling this heaviness I was telling David some of the things that I was thinking and feeling and I had this thought that I had kind of characterized in my own mind as "bad." And I thought it was like kind of a faithless thought, but I said it out loud to David anyway, right? And I told him, "I just feel a little forsaken. I feel a little bit forgotten."

And admittedly this is not a positive thought. It's probably why I was feeling hopeless. Do you see how it's connected? But it was a thought that my human brain had offered me because it's trying to help me survive this. And it thinks that letting me know the worst case scenario is really a helpful way to do that. Right? Like if you know you've been forsaken then maybe you can fix it and survive.

00:20:34:19 - 00:21:05:20
And so I told him, "Hey I feel so forsaken. And he kind of like gasped. He like sucked in his breath and he said, "Why would you say that? Why would you think that?" Right? And so then I was kind of mad at him for judging me, right? (We could do a whole podcast on judging people who are judging us.) But the only reason I was mad at him was because I had already heard the thought in my own head and I was judging myself for it already.

I told myself I never should have thought it. And in that moment I was judging me for having the thought at all. I was judging me for all of it. I was judging myself for my thoughts, for my feelings, and for what that meant about who I was.

And so I want to offer you a tool that can help you apply more meekness when you think about yourself, your own feelings, and your own thoughts as well. And have more tolerance for yourself for your own thoughts and feelings—just as we want to be more tolerant of other people and their experience. And this tool is not my tool. It's God's tool and this tool is prayer. And I just want to offer just a little bit different way to think about prayer that maybe you haven't thought about before and that will allow you to access meekness for yourself.

So when we pray we have an opportunity to talk to God about what we're feeling. And we do this by sharing our thoughts—our thoughts about our current situation and about our current life, what's going on for us. So when I pray I usually start by saying how I feel and when I'm seeking to be meek and humble with myself and my earth life experience, I don't judge those feelings. I don't judge the feelings I'm having. I just tell my Heavenly Father this is how I feel. Here I am on earth and this is how I feel. I feel discouraged or I feel excited or I feel tired or I feel thankful—whatever it is, I tell him how I feel.

00:22:29:03 - 00:22:58:12
And then I tell him why and all those whys are my thoughts. I feel discouraged and this is why. I feel hopeless because I'm thinking that you have forsaken us, right? This is why. I am brokenhearted and this is why. And I like to imagine it like my own personal coaching session with the very best coach in the universe. I like to see my prayers in many ways as like having a coaching session with heaven.

So in my coaching sessions I talk to my clients about how they're feeling and then I ask them why and they tell me all the reasons why. And when they start, all the reasons why they feel like they feel seem like facts. They seem like circumstances. It seems like they have to feel that way. But the more we talk and the more we explore the thoughts that create those feelings, the more I can show them that those are just optional, that they're just thoughts and they don't have to keep thinking that. They can think something entirely new.

And I love using prayer in this very same way. I love having a place where I can go and tell my Heavenly Father how I'm feeling because he is the ultimate source of non judgment. He doesn't gasp when I tell him I'm feeling forsaken, right? He doesn't gasp when I tell him what I'm thinking. I tell him how I feel honestly, and then I tell him why.

And the why of course is all my thoughts. It's all the things I think are true. It's all the things I think are just what is happening in my life. And after I say all those thoughts I just get quiet and I ask him if there's another way to think about it. And I just let him direct my mind. And just like when I am meek with other people, if I choose in that moment to be meek with myself and allow myself to be wrong about everything I've just said, I open up to the possibility that nothing I said is true. Nothing I've said is a fact. It's only the way I'm thinking about it.

00:24:35:12 - 00:25:02:22
And then I ask him what he thinks about it, how he sees it. And I ask him what else could I think about this? He knows that what I'm feeling I'm only feeling because of the thoughts I have chosen to think. And he also so knows that in this process of choosing those thoughts, I am learning what it means to choose and how to choose something different. And so he doesn't judge me in that learning process. He's just patiently waiting for me to see it another way.

So when I tell him that I feel forsaken and I tell him all the reasons why and then I ask him to help me see it in a different way and to think about it in a different way, he brings to my mind all the other ways to look at it. He brings to my mind all the other thoughts that are available to me to think about.

So when I am meek I don't tell myself that I'm doing it wrong. Because judging myself never allows me to access the divine wisdom right? LIke if I think that I shouldn't be feeling forsaken then I'm not going to tell him about it. I'm not going to get on my knees and tell the God of the universe, "Hey this is how I feel," right? Because I already think it's wrong and I don't want him to know about it.

But if I tell myself that none of my feelings are wrong, then I can go and explore the thoughts I'm thinking with him and ask for new ones. Being meek in that moment allows me to see another way of thinking about it. Judging myself or my feelings never allows me to see another way of thinking about it because I'm so mad about the way I'm currently thinking about it and so ashamed about the way that I'm currently thinking about it, that I can never access the thoughts that are creating it.

00:26:11:07 - 00:26:25:06
But you have to be meek to be able to do it. You have to drop your judgment of yourself. You have to be tolerant and humble with yourself to be able to see the current thoughts you're thinking and then ask for help to think something else.

I can't tell you how powerful this has been in my life. It has allowed me in so many ways to stop judging and hating myself and living in all that negative energy of constantly telling myself that I'm doing it wrong. And it also allows me to access his divine love for me and his way of thinking more often in my life.

Okay, the last tool that I want to give you related to acquiring meekness is to stop judging God. And to be honest with you I almost didn't bring this up because I don't really know if it's my place to even talk about this, but it has come up for me over and over again this week, so I want to offer it to you as well. (And if you want to judge me for doing it wrong I'm not going to argue with you. I'm sure you're right and I'm sure I'm doing it wrong.)

But let me just show you what I mean. So in our current circumstances with the coronavirus and really at any time when things don't go the way we think it should, we have a human tendency to judge God and to wonder if this really is the best plan. If he's really paying attention and if this is really the best thing that should be happening.

00:27:32:18 - 00:28:07:12
So for example I have a daughter who is about to go on a mission and she's scheduled to leave in less than 100 days. And for many of the missionaries from our church things are really up in the air right now. Many of them have had to return home and those that are still serving in their home countries are quarantined for the time being. And over the past couple of weeks I've had the thought several times, "Really? Really? Like really, this is the plan?" Isn't there a better way to run the gathering of Israel, right? Like isn't there some smoothing of the path and tearing down of the roadblocks that needs to happen here?

And subtle and not so subtle ways, I find myself thinking that I know how it should go. I'm telling Heaven in my own way that it's got it wrong and that it's doing it the wrong way.

But the other facet of meekness that I need to access is acknowledging that of course I'm mistaken about that. Of course I don't know. Of course I have no idea about the best way to run a gathering or a second coming or anything else for that matter. Right?

So this week I returned over and over again to the thought: He knows it all. And nothing has gone wrong. I am not in charge. He is.

00:28:46:21 - 00:29:05:03
And I have thought again and again about how when Jesus died the apostles were completely devastated. They were grief stricken. I'm sure that they thought it wasn't supposed to go that way. Like all the hope and confidence that he had come to save them from oppression had like vanished and disappeared.

They might have felt a little bit forsaken. They probably felt confused and hopeless and lost. They were disappointed and discouraged and forlorn. They thought it was going to go differently than it did. I'm thinking that a few of them thought they knew more than God, at that point, about how he should be saving his people.

And so I want to offer to each of us the power of meekness in this moment. There is no power in thinking that it's all gone wrong. There is no solace in thinking that all of this could have or should have been avoided or prevented.

The power in meekness is to acknowledge that we don't know and we never knew how it was supposed to go, but someone else does. And you can put down your judgement even in subtle ways—even in wishing ways (like I wish it was different for my daughter)— and accept that all of this is God's business and he knows what he's doing.

00:30:04:28 - 00:30:25:28
Ironically our most powerless place is when we think we know better when we want to control everything ourselves and others and even God's plan because we trap ourselves into feeling judgement for others and for ourselves and for God. And we can't access peace when we are in a fight with what is not ours to control in the first place.

Your power is being meek—in relation to yourself, in relation to others, and in relation to God. And Ulisses Soares says that meekness makes you feel calm, docile, tolerant, and submissive which is going to feel so different than angry and judgmental and frustrated and defensive.

For what it's worth, that's what I have for you today. Recognize that you don't know how other people should be doing it. You don't know how God should be doing it. And you can't access your highest self or his wisdom when you're judging yourself for the way you are doing it.

Instead I invite you to set down all of that heaviness that comes with judgment and access meekness by not wanting to change how other people think and feel, by using the power of prayer to reveal your own thinking and change those thoughts so that you can feel better, and by believing that the right person is in charge of all of this right now and always.

00:31:30:15 - 00:31:50:16
I really believe that one way to get more power over your emotional life right now is to access and cultivate the attribute of meekness. And in so many ways it can completely change the experience you are having right now. And that my friends is 100 percent awesome! I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!