Sure, in your life, you have many roles with family, employer and friends and you’d want your movie to show how well you meet the standards of those roles. But what about your heart and soul, your private voice—the narrative about your hopes and fears and desires that began in your youth and has continued every day since? In turn, scared and heroic, bored and enthusiastic, passionate and indifferent, ambitious and lazy, selfish and compassionate, this narrative is the running account of your felt experience. How would it show up in your movie? How does it show up in your day-to-day interactions? Who of us dares to be spontaneous?

We laugh when someone is characterized as being “lost” in his or her own movie—somehow not in-sync with the rest of the world. But sometimes each of us actually feels like parts of our own movie are directed and produced by a studio other than our own. Or that we’re at the effect of a plot line or momentum we didn’t initiate. Or that we’re leading a life that we did not creatively script.

In other words, though you may always sense that you are your movie’s central character, you may sometimes feel that the movie is running away from you, that you don’t have creative control. Don’t forget that from within and from others, you have to expect challenges to your authority. The visions of others will compete with yours; other plots creep into your story line. Do you have the wisdom to know when you should press on with your private dreams; when you should let them go?

The supporting cast—all of whom think themselves the star of their own movie—has a lot to say about your role, your direction, your budget, your locations; she may need a ride to her soccer game and he a ride to the dentist. Your mate may want your movie to be more about his or her dreams. Plus, of course, there are all those “extras.” You probably didn’t hire them but they’re in your movie, too, driving like maniacs, broadcasting their cell-phone conversations and monopolizing the limelight. In addition, a life of your own design, aka your own movie, requires that you deal with all the personal vagaries that plague even the best director: inertia, conflicting sentiments, worries about the budget, etc.

Of course, you can’t start your movie from scratch. In popular culture, there is always the rewind button. Characters in some sitcoms are allowed to have second thoughts and re-do the scene. But you can’t count upon replays. That which has already been dramatized is done. You must wrest creative control of a production well underway. Think about it. How much was already underway before you realized that it was really up to you to carve out a vision, and to architect meaning and purpose and to find financing for the whole picture?

It’s a daunting challenge for the voice of the private self, who typically stays behind the scenes, to bring itself forth and up for consideration on the big screen.

PODCAST: The story of your lifeThink of your private or subjective voice being your authentic self. It is the voice of a self that is easily compromised or lost, unfortunately. You may not know exactly when this subjective voice started but no doubt you were very young—just beginning to think. And it’s a voice whose narrative of hope and fear and desire has continued every day since.

It travels with you over your lifetime. It’s a record of your subjective journey—capturing your thoughts and feelings. It includes your expectations and what you imagined. It includes memories about what’s happened to you. It includes what you saw and listened to, what you witnessed and what you heard yourself say.

And it’s a voice of knowing and a unity of experience containing what you’ve thought about and studied and the impressions you’ve absorbed. At any time, the theme of the narrative may be romantic or wishful. Or pessimistic. Or ambitious. Or ambivalent. Or maybe angry. Everyone’s subjective experience is unique and subject to temperament.

What’s also interesting about an authentic subjective voice is how seldom it gets to be publicly expressed. Most of the time, you are fulfilling your roles. Each of these roles has conditions that must be met, conditions that may not match your authentic sensibilities, thoughts and feelings or your pictures about how life should be.

In other words, to succeed at the many roles you must enact all day long, conventional expectations must be met. You must be a parent, or a friend, or a mate, or an employee or a boss, according to the role’s functionary standards.

To meet your responsibilities, you adapt, accommodate and adjust because that’s what’s required. Some of the necessary conformity goes down easily. Some probably does not. In either case, you’re expected to metabolize the challenges and frustrations and let your private thoughts about the conformity stay behind the scenes. Of course, your authentic voice—its narrative thinking—is at play while you’re doing the roles. How well you recover from loss and adjust to good or bad fortune and up the ante when challenged by competitors depends in large part upon the quality of the control you have over your authentic subjective experience.

Authenticity is also the underpinnings and joy—alive, vibrant and spontaneous—when you experience intimacy and belonging. It’s what’s at play when you love, when you’re connected, when you pitch in, when you have the experience that who you are and how you’re living your life is making a difference.

The quality of this journey, how you can create a life of your own authentic design, is the focus of these podcasts. Of course, your journey won’t change the confrontational nature of the world we live in. But the ability to grasp, own and drive the narrative of your authentic voice is crucial to your ability to deal with the struggle.

Each of us and all of us must make sure that our authentic subjective journey includes the acquisition of intellectual and emotional resources to deal with the antagonism, rivalry and loss common in human relations. We need the subjective skill-set to address stress, anxiety and discontent, to transcend self-doubt and pessimism, and to extend ourselves generously and compassionately to those who depend on us for performance, leadership and stability. We need the wherewithal to create and enact the objectives that match our authentic hopes for substance and for meaning.

There is something exquisite, profound and luminous about the self-awareness that connects us with the bittersweet experience that has shaped our own unique journey and the transcendent possibilities of who we might yet become.

P.S. I am doing a 3-day Retreat Workshop in June in Newport Beach, CA. I invite you to join me if you would like to work on creating a life of your own authentic design. For information and to register, please call Jean Belfrey. 800 818-7818.

In the Retreat workshop with me, you’ll learn the discipline for creating a life of your own design. Many of the points that I address in my posts and podcasts will be covered in greater depth, and you’ll learn how to apply them to your life.

For example, in the current series on the proverbial bear, we looked at how difficult life is and how challenging it will always be. During the Retreat we will describe the challenges that the environment and other people present and identify the human bear that resides in each of us. Then we will work on specific strategies and substantive skill-sets that meet the challenges that come from our circumstances and those that weigh on us personally.

As you come to recognize how history, language and nature have shaped you, you’ll find yourself ready and eager to acquire new habits, practices and ways of being that are a better match for your vision and hopes for yourself and for those who depend on you.

We address how to get over disappointment, loss and failure and how to temper the aggression, antagonism and rivalry that are common in most human relations. You’ll have an opportunity to set aside for the moment what Scoreboard wants you to want and to take a good look at what you really want.

As a result of your participation, you can expect to have a much stronger experience of intimacy, connection and belonging and the confidence to take hold of and drive a remarkable and creative control of your life.

During these three days you will get in touch with your subjective narrative—the thoughts and feelings that have been running through your head since you first noticed yourself thinking. You’ll find yourself better equipped to deal with the oftentimes pressure-filled and corrupt opportunism so prevalent in the environment we live in. The Retreat will inspire you to take up or strengthen your participation in the good fight.

The good fight, eons-old with religious, philosophical and artistic roots, has always been about improving the quality and experience of life for more people. Yet it’s easy to lose sight of amid the competing claims for our attention. I’ve spent the last 30 years of my life addressing this topic and the Retreat I teach offers a structure that supports this big-picture purpose and is relevant and meaningful to how you are living your life.

I can promise you that being in the Retreat with me will have a lasting effect on your ability to see a bigger picture and have a bigger life, on your ability to address stress and anxiety and on your ability to design a plan for your life and put it into action.

Call Jean at 800 818 7818 for more details and to register.

In part one titled, Introducing the bear, we looked at just how difficult life can be. In part two titled, Transcendent bearings and decisive moments, we acknowledged that just being able to create and maintain our transcendent bearings is a fight. In part three titled, Where the bear takes up residence and in part four titled, Bear with me, we addressed the bear that resides in each of us. Let’s continue.

Discontent seems to make sense. Life is unfair. Millions—perhaps billions—of people who have fears, hopes and desires just like we do don’t even have a shot at a comfortable life.

For them, starved of hope, daily existence is a pain-filled struggle. Discontent is also a piece of the cultural impress, stamped onto our way of being. Though it may pervade our experience of life, most of us don’t question the hows and the whys of it. Discontent is discontent, isn’t it?

Interestingly, though, we, committed to autonomy, may discover that discontent, illuminated and bared, can be addressed in a powerful new way. Let me tell you what I mean.

First, as we know, “good” Scoreboard players don’t tend to display discontent. They pretend that they have “it” all under control. Any little dip in the high-profile Scoreboard player’s subjective experience can be solved by an upgrade in vehicle, home, spouse, fashion or flavor profile. In other words, in a popular narrative about Scoreboard players, the discontent occasioned by the rivalrous impulse is relieved by the continuous acquisition of the stuff that can be strutted under the Scoreboard’s lights. Aware of Scoreboard’s message, we may ourselves try to “suck it up” and pretend that we, too, don’t have to struggle with discontent.

But discontent can also be a sentimental form that some of us privilege as particularly substantive and meaningful. From this perspective, we may describe Scoreboard players who keep acquiring stuff as superficial and describe those of us who feel dissatisfied as deep, maybe even noble. If we inhabit this form, we act as if the troubled or trounced spirit were somehow worthier. It seems to make sense. It IS contentious out there. Hard-hearted. Who with a soul wouldn’t be discontent?

On the other hand, to a great extent, America’s way of life is built upon the back of our programmed “willingness” to yoke ourselves into the slug-it-out, mano a mano Machiavellian world. Some of us bear the yoke prosperously, some not, because neither culture nor our formal educations predictably teach us how to be an honorable contender in this competition for life and lifestyle. As such, our only options may seem to be the display of ever more stuff or the privileging of a moody discontent occasioned by the yoke.

But in fact, competition is here to stay. The rivalrous impulse moves us relentlessly. Our shot at living a meaningful life is usually directly correlated with the perspective we have and the substance we have in light of this fact.

Of course, our effort to acquire the perspective and the substance of the honorable contender doesn’t mean we’ll win every round in the ring of life. Even if perfectly fit, disciplined and psyched, we’ll win some and lose others. But adversity itself is not a defeat.

Nor is reeling from the punch or a knock-down. Clearly, though, we never give up the good fight. When we go down, if we go down, we go down fighting. And tomorrow we rise again!

Bear with me now as we continue to talk about how the bear in each of us invades and co-opts our desired way of being in the world. Sure, its instincts have a relative and instructional merit. But undisciplined, the bear plays havoc with our kind, decent and thoughtful humane intentions.

Beasts without language, including the pre-linguistic animals we were thousands of years ago, have no subjective referential capacity, no transcendent bearings, no linguistic ability to get over their impulses and primal instincts. Though we can romance the authenticity of their fight-or-flee responses and we may think our pets are our best, most loyal friends, in fact, pets and bears aren’t bred to meet the demands of a complex life in the fast lane.

In other words, animals are what they are. Virtually everything about their behavior is determined by do-or-die immediacy, by impulse, by appetite, and ultimately by pattern and habit. As far as we know, they have no subjective narrative and no creative control over this ruled-by-nature system of stored responses awaiting stimulus.

We modern human beings are also host to this reflexive, seething mass of drives, impulses, wishes, fears and the like. We can dress fashionably, collect wine and first editions, drive SUVs and use our thumbs to message and to play video games. But we must also deal constantly with the living system that we are; that is, the eons-old simple-reflex wiring that is not a natural fit for 21^st century life.

What distinguishes us from other animals is our subjective capacity to transcend this unexamined visceral immediacy in favor of practices that we might recognize and characterize as humane, decent, generous and meaningful.

Transcendence is a powerful determining choice enabling us to begin anew and to recreate and leverage our ways and means of being in the world. We enjoy a much more substantively rewarding life when we’ve taken responsibility for and can transcend the brute fact of the bear. And certainly, the manner in which we articulate, frame and address our problems has a good deal to do with whether or not we solve them.

Yes, the immediate gut reaction to uncertainty, fears and appetites is a piece of the many intelligences that inform the modern human being. And raw feelings are compelling, to say the least. But the human-made desire to see a bigger picture, be a bigger person and make a bigger contribution is also authentic and can be the backbone of our existence.

However, if we’ve not spent enough time building a stand-up personhood that can resist not only its own internal primal immediacy but also the immediate temptation of its conditioned habits, this resource may remain largely unavailable.

In the last podcast, we addressed our transcendent bearings and decisive moments. The human project, eons-old with religious, philosophical and artistic roots, has always been about improving the quality and experience of life for more people. However, it’s easy to lose sight of this purpose.

I use the word “bearings” in reference to two conditions. First, to our awareness of the position relative to our surroundings. Not much of our workaday, everyday routine orients us toward the big-picture purpose. In terms of what’s meaningful, we can be myopic.

Bearings also refer to structural parts that support weight or withstand a strain such as a wall that supports a beam. In order to live a meaningful life of our own design, we must have the emotional and physical strength to bear the weight of opposition to such design.

So, who or what opposes the design? Others. Circumstance and happenstance. And the bear that has taken up residence in our own immediacy.

If we were to describe a real bear’s immediacy, we would describe her instincts and rivalrous reflexes. She knows when to eat, sleep, groom and help the cubs. She knows which animals are friends and which she should run from. She knows that food is scarce and other animals are competing for it. Her inbred instincts for survival regulate her whole approach to life.

We, too, have natural survival instincts and reflexes that regulate what we do. However, we are also imprinted and regulated by convention and subjected to the dominant voices we hear.

One of the dominant voices we hear is Scoreboard’s, a voice to which many defer as if it were the Almighty’s. Conspicuous consumer or hip low-profile player alike, we are aware of the score and want nothing and no one to interfere with our standing on it.

As Scoreboarders, we’re under a lot of pressure. On edge. Quick to anger. Reflexively defensive. Maybe spoiling for a fight. Others may think they need to tiptoe around us so as not to provoke an outburst. Simply said, the pressure drives the bear into behaving badly.

Of course, behaving badly doesn’t sit well with others and if the truth be told, ultimately it does not sit well with us either. Even though we can point to any number of circumstances that would seem to warrant our immediate or deliberate antagonism, we know that we’re out of self-control, no longer in possession of who we are and how we are.

Yes, there are real threats to life and limb that we must resist, but for the most part we are antagonistic because we lack the will and skill to be otherwise. Indeed, if we’ve not accumulated a rich trove of reflective and spiritual capital, we defer reflexively to the bear which is, of course, an act of submission.

In sum, while we acknowledge the relative validity of our primal instincts, we champion reflection. We don’t want the bear in our immediacy to be the sole source of our active and emotional generosity. I titled my holiday podcast, The season for love and affection. But in fact, every season is the season for love and affection, and refining our ability to get over ourselves in immediacy is our means to such expression.

But we were optimistic, too, optimistic in the sense of not daunted. We’re ready and eager to deal with what has always been a difficult challenge. For not only do we have our own upkeep to deal with. We are also confronted with the demand for leadership and contribution in an often cold and spiritually impoverished world. (But, of course! The “good” fight takes place in an endless sequence of rounds as we engage one struggle for transcendence after another.)

However, there is more to being on the right side of history than a realistic and noble heart. Merely finding a place to stand is a challenge. Think about it.

We are in the world already in full swing, and we live in a time when the clamor for our time and resources is intense. Though we live in a prosperous country, earning a decent living may be harder than ever, and we can’t ignore just how much financial capital is needed to provide for ourselves and those near and dear who depend on us.

Furthermore, fear-mongering and crass, corrupt opportunism have become national pastimes. In other words, in this environment, just being able to create and maintain our transcendent bearings is a fight.

Nonetheless, in the best of times and in the worst of times, the demand for hope and for leadership is upon us. We exist at the effect of the historical demand to represent standards or regulative ideals that reflect the evolving transcendent narrative.

This narrative of who human beings are and who they might yet be has religious, philosophical and humanist roots. Whether inspired by the divine or by artists and scholars, human beings harness their brains’ power to traverse the path from immediacy to transcendence by acquiring their transcendent bearings and acting on decisive moments.

These decisive moments don’t come once in a lifetime or infrequently. They happen all day long. Often they occur in antagonistic environments that make us reflexively submissive or reflexively hot-headed. And they matter.

They matter to us because our performance on their behalf is alive in the neural underpinnings—in the living system that we are. And these decisive moments matter to us because our performance in their service is often the basis of bottom-line assessments by others. We aren’t necessarily being nasty when we characterize another as indecisive or as a birdbrain or a bully. That’s what we see.

So, we want to reclaim these decisive moments from the rote. They are opportunities for artistry, genius, connection and contribution. And, as I said, our practiced responses live in us materially as nerve and neuron, and they live in us metaphorically, as substance, heft and backbone.

In short, the means to a remarkable life is the means themselves, the day-in and day-out safekeeping—in thought, word and deed—of our transcendent bearings. Who might we be? What contribution might we make? What gratitude and generosity might we express? What contentiousness and misrepresentation might we reject?

We all know about the bear. We might overhear, “That math exam was a bear,” or we might say, “My neighbors had a bear of an argument last night.” We also know about the “bear market,” a situation in the stock market that plays havoc with our investment portfolios. And then, there’s the fact of the bear. The everyday, very difficult challenge of life that each of us and all of us need to be prepared for, like it or not. And like it, we don’t.

It may be natural that human beings don’t like what is difficult. However, as far as we know, other animals don’t talk to themselves about how difficult it is going to be to construct the next dam, build the next nest or forage yet again for food. Typically, animals not built to adapt to and endure their situations die.

But we seem to think that things should be easy—the challenge of life or anything else—and that it is cool to pretend that we’ve got it under control. No one wants to be seen sweating. In fact, in many arenas, “swagger” and “attitude” seem to count for more than the hard work involved in holding a life together.

And, in the final analysis, if we can’t hide the fact that our lives are messy, problematic and relentlessly demanding, we blame it on circumstance: lack of opportunity, insufficient cash, wrong spouse or relationship, less than picture-perfect children or perhaps a bad choice.

These swaggering positions and excuses, which pervade our culture, are corrupt or bogus and they mask other situations. Life is challenging and unpredictable and often disruptive. Much is out of our control. Risk, especially in the long run, is likely to pan out adversely. Disappointment is practically guaranteed. It is only possible to think otherwise if we have no experience. It is also self-destructive to deny how challenging life is—a denial made in service of a cool and above-it-all Scoreboard image—because it is counterproductive to fail to learn to struggle, win, lose and to prevail long-term.

However, one of Scoreboard’s ranking strategies is based on distance—distance from the toil with the bear that living demands. Let’s hide our brute fears and anxieties and our subjective worries and uncertainties. Let’s hide the need and the caring, the broken hopes, the naked desires and fears, the wants and aches. The less we have to associate with the brute and ordinary struggle of life, the better.

Of course, such a strategy is not cool. It’s coldly soulless. Gaming the reality of how difficult life is has a price—often overlooked. The image-conscious game of privileging the pristine and permanent over the participatory and transcendent is actually, in the long-term, the setup for the fall.

The image-conscious game gets in the way of our ability to create reflective and spiritual authority—a different kind of capital—the accumulation of which allows us to thoughtfully shape the content of our lives. In fact, no ultimate circumstance, purpose, meaning or truth provides a permanently rewarding conclusion or permanently comfortable respite. Every day the sun comes up. Every day we face life. Every day we face creation. So, we, you and I, come together. Our task? To face the bear. To be ready for difficulty. To endure.

Yes, we volunteered to undertake many responsibilities—desiring financial prosperity and a family, perhaps, or in service of an obligation such as the care of an aging parent. But regarding demands made by the cultural zeitgeist, we seem to have no choice but to meet them—the consequences of a failure to do so can be dire. Take parenthood, for instance. It is not a discrete accomplishment. Along with it come many other conventional expectations and time commitments.

Especially if we find ourselves on playing fields wherein our temperament, personality and skills are not a natural fit, our responsibilities can be anxiety-producing. Comparisons are omnipresent. We may judge ourselves harshly when we compare our performance in these arenas to those whose temperaments and skills are a natural fit.

Nonetheless, despite the fact of all these functionary roles and their demands, the spirit wanting what it wants is an axiom of life—for most of us as convincing as gravity. And if we ignore this human spirit, our lives, however occupied, feel impoverished, incomplete, hollow.

So, though a successful, social personhood is expected of us, the more private, interior self has its own needs. It is here that we generate peace of mind and stability—no matter how busy. It is here that we make sense of the world that we live in. It is here that the spirit soars.

But it’s not a given, this spirit. Though it wants what it wants, it must be refined to be made meaningful and to make a difference to the lives of others.

A creatively intelligent and responsible expression of this spirit is a result of a carefully acquired and practiced capacity. It is not a mindset or belief or feeling easily accessed. It begins with an understanding of ourselves as not only instruments or role players but as transcendent possibility.

Of course, we can seem to get by without really acquiring spiritual maturity, without cultivating affinity, compassion and generosity. We don’t go to jail if we are egoistic, verbally aggressive, antagonistic or thoughtlessly submissive.

But life can feel hollow, and we can feel less than who we might be, without it. Yet, too often under the pressures of the everyday, we shortchange or sideline our commitment to the fulfillment and contribution that spiritual depth yields.

Too easily we are derailed. Too easily we lose our focus. Too easily we are implored by bandwagons to mindlessly conform to the selfishness, nastiness and resentment that now characterize much of politics, the media and other institutions.

We want to be standard-bearers for another possibility. The expression of a deep and abiding soulfulness requires a constancy of purpose and transcendent practice—the act of getting over ourselves. So it is important to stay on track with the practices—not with rote lip service but boldly. Power, inspiration, momentum, creativity and transcendence favor the bold.

It could be said we get a good deal when we play Scoreboard because it hides us in plain sight. Let me tell you what I mean.

By manufacturing a dazzling aura, with glitter, gloss and stuff, Scoreboard hides our lack of substance, heart and soul. It hides their absence from others also being played. It is a kind of ego protection for those who don’t want to get even glimpses of their own superficiality. In other words, when Scoreboard does its job well, what is shallow and vain is hidden by the hoopla.

Here, in America, of course, big heads and swelled egos are always in our face. If not in person, we see them on television or read about them in magazines and online. (The media is playing us, too. Doesn’t their audience share increase when they feature the self-promoting, conceited behavior of celebrities or fame-seeking politicians, addicts and convicted criminals pretending to be born-again?)

But status-seeking, ego-protected self-promotion doesn’t need a media circus. Against often capricious or bogus standards, millions of people find much to celebrate, admire and praise about themselves and are cruelly contemptuous or dismissive of others.

We boast obviously—our bids for approval and admiration naked and cheap. But we who know how to do our bragging modestly do it best. First, we try to hide our status anxiety and contentiousness. Then, we “objectively” tick off our achievements. Finally, after mentioning a minor, acceptable mistake (“yes, I did inhale”), piously acknowledging team effort (a team we’ve exploited), and making a faux show of reticence, we hammer down our righteous place on the Scoreboard.

Not all chronically self-centered people are necessarily big show-offs. Many of us take a less is more approach. We like to have our “modest” and “deep” choices and tastes displayed as if they were in some crucial sense more fundamentally meaningful than those made by others who conspicuously display their stuff.

Needless to say, such coarseness (or bogus humility) and artifice are not only unattractive. They actually impoverish the environment in which human possibility may thrive. For even as religious teaching fades from the consciousness of many, the demand for humane, decent and thoughtful behavior remains of critical importance to individual, family, community and state.

There is little cause for celebration until we understand that our lives—absent the ability to “get over” what is coarse, brute-like and obsessively selfish—are small and petty lives that barely scratch the surface of human possibility.

On the other hand, there IS something to celebrate. We honor the self when we temper the aggression, antagonism and rivalry common in human relations. We show respect for the self and our unique possibility when we respond to the challenge of a substantive life and take responsibility for who we are, for who we might yet be, and for how we might be known.