Useful Thought #2

God never gives you more than you can handle

This concept is often interpreted as: God, personified, determines what situations you can only just handle, and then gives them to you every now and again when you need testing, perhaps, or for your own good, or for some other unfathomable reason of His own. This gives many people comfort, and I'm glad of that, but thinking of it this way doesn't make sense for me. I have my own take on it, which I may or may not have poached or co-opted from Byron Katie. It is as follows:

First, I substitute God for life or reality, i.e. what is: this moment, now. This is because I don't know whether or not God exists, but I can know that the present moment exists, or exists as much as something can exist. So, I interpret it as life, or the present moment, never gives you more than you can handle. How do I know that? Because you handle every moment -- if you weren't handling it, you would be dead. As I see it (and this is almost definitely poached from BK), there are two choices in every moment -- handle it, or die. But this isn't a choice you have to make consciously: you either handle it, or you die; therefore if you're not dead, you must be handling it. Even if you feel more rotten than you thought possible, and you think you are handling it badly and no-one could handle this situation worse than you are now, you are still handling it. And so I believe that 'God never gives you more than you can handle' is the literal truth. And even if you stop handling whatever it is and you die, all it means is you're now handling death, not life.

This is a wonderful thought to have in my head, but I will say that I often lose sight of it, especially when I'm in an anxiety attack, like I was this evening. But the Work gets me back onto it, always.

The Work

A blog about me can't go any further without mentioning The Work. I'm trying to figure out the best way of explaining the Work, because it seems to mean different things for different people, so I think I'll go with the simplest.

The Work is a way of questioning your thoughts, ideas and concepts, particularly the ones that cause you stress. It allows you to examine whether these thoughts are actually true for you. You do this by writing down the thought, and then applying four questions to it:

Is that true?
How do I react when I believe that thought?
Who would I be without that thought?
Turn it around.

This is the only self-help technique that has ever worked for me, because it's the only one that doesn't tell me what's true, but lets me figure out what's true for me. It's my therapy and my constant companion, and in the short 6 months I've been doing it, it has transformed me. This may not be apparent on the outside, but as they say, it's the inside that counts.

Byron Katie is the lady who came up with The Work, and to give you an idea of it, here's a video of her facilitating it:



If you're interested in finding out more about the Work, search "Byron Katie" on YouTube, check out the website for The Work, and look at Byron Katie's blog. She has three books out, and they are well worth reading, but you don't need them to get started if you want to give it a go yourself. And if you do decide to give it a go, I guarantee you won't regret it.