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At seven or eight years old, Guy Finley was riding in the Hollywood Christmas parade, where his father was the honorary marshal, sitting on the lap of one of the biggest stars of the day. He remembers thinking, what’s wrong here? Everybody was so fearful, so angry and so anxious. Born into a show business family, he grew up with a contradiction he could not reconcile. That question, what is this pain, set him on a path he has walked for almost 70 years, and he says he is still just beginning. Today Guy is the Founding Director of Life of Learning Foundation, a nonprofit centre for spiritual discovery, and the acclaimed author of The Secret of Letting Go and more than 50 other books and audio programmes, translated into 30 languages.
Not the problem, but the mirror
Letting go, Guy says, is an inside story. We tend to look out at the world as the party responsible for the pain we are in, and he believes it is just not true. You cannot separate the experience of life from the nature having that experience. When he has a problem with another person, that person isn’t the problem. They are here to show him where parts of him are still clinging to certain ideas and demands. He calls them secret agents of God. And the work, he says, is done by seeing into our consciousness, not by fighting with it.
You cannot satisfy a fear
So why do we chase validation? Guy believes that affirming qualities we do not have only leaves us living in fear of proving we are what we imagine ourselves to be. He remembers being 12 at his father’s business meetings, in a suit and tie, his left shoulder hurting so badly he wanted to cry. Even that child, already conditioned to want approval, was afraid he would not get it. You cannot satisfy a fear, Guy says. You can dope it up or distract yourself from it, but until you understand the nature of fear itself, you will live in it. In his words, people bother us for only one reason: what we want from them.
The circle of self
Guy describes it as dominoes. Desire gives rise to image, image to identity, identity to attachment, attachment is dependency, and dependency is fear. He calls it the circle of self, and he is clear that a conditioned nature cannot free itself from its own conditioning. What can help is a light that reveals where we are conditioned. Escaping desire, he says, is lunacy. We are here to transcend the nature that believes it can complete itself through its desire.
Relationship is revelation
Why are we drawn to anyone at all? Guy believes we discover ourselves through relationship. At first everything is oh yeah. Then oh yeah turns into oh no, and we meet the part of us that wants to blame the other person for not loving us the way they said they would. There is no bad revelation, he says. He is just as clear that trying to change the world is, in his words, egotism of the worst kind. You don’t change a rose. Guy has been with his wife for 46 years, and says he has never once raised his voice to her.
The dragon never had any teeth
From around 18 to 25, Guy lived a celibate life, almost in a cave, only to find he still got angry. Awakening, he came to see, isn’t some sudden aha. It is the gradual recognition that who and what you are cannot be defined by any experience the mind wants to create. He tells the story of a knight who puts down his sword and shield and leaps into the dragon’s mouth, only to find it never had any teeth. It was all gums. For Guy, that is what an awakening is: the collapse of a false identity that produces false shadows in order to be the slayer of them.
Guy left us with three shiny golden nuggets, gathered into one practice he calls Stop, Drop, Endure. Stop: the moment you feel a fear or an anxiety, come to a stop, as present as you can in your body. Drop: catch the thoughts that rush in to explain why you feel the way you do, and be the observer of your consciousness rather than its servant. Endure: be willing to stay with what you feel, without reaching for a time to come when the pain will be gone. Useless suffering, Guy explains, believes escape is coming. Conscious suffering stays and watches.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube
Find Out More About Guy Finley
Website: https://www.guyfinley.org
Instagram: @guyfinleyofficial
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/GuyFinley
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/guyfinleyofficial/
Ready to turn your gift for helping people into a real coaching career? Visit: https://riseandthriveglobal.com/positive-psychology-coaching/