Video: You're Already Perfect
This video is an additional resource for the Level III section of Kyle's Book Life at Altitude. Read the proceeding excerpt from the book here:
Drive: The Power behind Your Dysfunction
Drive is the energy that says I need to be more than I am, or have more than I have. And it’s incredibly disruptive to our culture, because drive causes us to forget or to ignore the impact it has on other parts of our lives. If I’m driven to make a million dollars, I may not notice the impact on my family, my relationships, or my health. It’s the same in our society: when we drive to have annual growth in our GDP, we’re willing to ignore the effects on us environmentally or socially. Drive creates a ripple of damage around it because it doesn’t take into account the effects of the determination to get a certain result.
In my work with people with drive, I’ve noticed that there’s a particular energy that fuels drive. We recognize that drive comes out of voids, which are unmet needs. However, if you start feeling into the energy around your drive, you may find that the energy behind it isn’t just excitement or enthusiasm, but actually, a quality of anger. You’re either angry at yourself, or at life, or with your parents, because you feel behind from where you think you should be.
When we have unmet voids from childhood, there’s a certain level of resentment that comes along with it. Our DNA, in a way, still yearns for an idealized childhood, one that has all the voids checked off and all the matrices perfect. We come into life wanting to sing, dance, and play, be creative, inspired, honored, and loved unconditionally, and when our inner self doesn’t get that, we tend to have resentment built up. We think that, at this stage in our lives, we would maybe be more psychologically healthy, adventurous, or successful. We think the unmet needs or wants in our childhood have resulted in a human being that has deficit compared to if we had received a perfect situation. We imagine that if we had a perfect childhood situation, we would actually be more than we are. That’s why we tend to blame our parents for our childhood experiences.
Once we’ve cleared out the pain and worked with our own shame and judgment on ourselves, the next level around voids has an acceptance aspect to it that resolves the anger behind the drive. The anger behind drive comes from whether we were encouraged to explore the world and had a safe place to come back to. If we didn’t have this, we will often (subconsciously, on some level) realize that we would be more than we are if we had received it.
Part of drive is to make up for that deficit by trying to be more than. We feel like we’re behind and have to catch up. We use more energy, keep ourselves more anxious and busy, more active and more socially engaged, join more boards, doing more and more and more in an attempt to catch up with our potential. One of the most disastrous ideas of our culture is the idea that I have more potential than I’ve already realized. This extra drive is driving us all crazy. When I truly let go of my voids, I have to give up the idea that I could have been any more than what I am in this moment. That deep and profound acceptance of where I am right now and what my capacity is starts to let me off the hook for doing more. When we truly accept our pace, our natural flow and energy of things, we come into greater wholeness and integrity within ourselves.
Resolution of this drive is one of the most vital cultural transformations that we need if we want to be in balance with the planet and each other. Because we’re expecting too much from ourselves, our kids, the planet, and the resources on the planet, our expectations are becoming impossible to meet. The wantiness of trying to fill these voids is turning us into reckless consumers. We need to meet the reality of the planet and each other. War and imbalances in all sorts of situations come back to this basic immaturity that so many of us carry within ourselves. The more we heal it, the better off we will all be.
To learn more about how you’re already perfect, watch the “You’re Already Perfect” video above.