How I Used Trump To Find My Heart Again

Tokyo. November 9th. 2016.

I am watching the election slowly confirm Trump’s ascendency to the Presidency of the United States, when Skype rudely interrupts my despair.

It’s my 17 year old daughter calling from Australia…

“Daddy, I’m scared.”

What can I say to her?

My conclusion surprises even me. We cannot, must not, condemn those who voted for him, as we all suffer from the same condition that led to this unexpected outcome.

Anger, despair, rage belong to all of us.

If you looking for a hope lifting, ‘we can triumph’ rah, rah speech, I advise you give up reading now and seek an angry protest movement. Because anger doesn’t cut it with me.

However – if you’re still reading – ask your Self this question: how is being outraged with Trump and his followers any different from the outrage they may feel towards you? Essentially, there is no difference in the mechanism, even if your values are diametrically opposite. Fighting this situation using the same mechanism as the opposition is a recipe for no change at all. A teacher of Alexander's discovery should know this.

Any result is simply the embodiment of the means by which we got there.

As Marj put it to me one day in Sydney in 1986:

“You can’t lose tension by making tension. It doesn’t work that way.”

An effect is determined by its cause. Water is boiled by heat, not ice. If an oak tree will only grow from an acorn seed, how can despair and outrage be the seeds of love and compassion?

When Trump has won your heart – by being the gift you needed to wake up – you are ready to join a protest movement. When joy is on your face, and love fills your heart, you are ready to declare what you stand for, what you want and what you do to achieve it until your last dying breath.

Love trumps hate, remember?

Until then, your job is you. Your job is finding peace and contentment. I realised, on my Skype with Angelica, that this is what we both needed to do…

“Look around the room sweetheart – are you in danger?”

Of course she wasn’t. And neither am I right now. And neither are you. That is not to say you feel safe, it is only to point out that – right now ­– there is no danger immediately present. No-one is holding a knife to your throat, or threatening to hit you with a baseball bat.

The danger is in your head. It is what you imagine that frightens you. Until it happens, it doesn’t exist anywhere else. That awful future you are seeing? It is a fiction, a fairy tale of your own construction.

This is the trickiest part, because our default is to be a victim.

It is just so much easier to blame others for how you feel. Then you can find excuses and justify your condition, rather than recognise how reality exists, and how you are responsible for that reality.

FM's expressed this victim mechanism as “endgaining’. Endgaining involves obsessing about an imaginary ‘end’ which does not exist, then reacting to that fairy tale as though it did exist.

It’s a mild form of insanity, and it happens on an almost daily basis.

The US election was a gift – designed to show you how you are the cause of all that you feel. This is the insanity – not that Trump won the election, but that I believe this event caused my reaction. That my despair is somehow related to what happened on November 8th. They are only mildly related, there is no real cause and effect happening here.

I am the person who frightens me. This recognition gets my power back.

Now, I am in charge again – not a helpless victim to events beyond my control. Instead, I am free, strong, clear and ready to do what I must do to make this world a better place.