We Weren't Made to be Punished

Forcing yourself to do the "right" thing isn't the way

It's amazing how many things finally make sense to me now that I have gone through a conversion process and learned to love God. Seriously—playing music, working out, not doing drugs, loving people—it’s all so obvious now as to why you should do those things! And not just the why from a rational perspective, I genuinely feel it in my body.

When I do these activities, and many other good actions, I feel great! The walls around my heart drop. Life is beautiful and I am free from the slavery of the darkness (aka sin, or shame, or self coercion, etc etc).

It doesn’t even take effort. I think that’s one of the worst things about so much “advice” modern people give—that you have to FORCE yourself to work out, eat right, be nice to people, go to church, or whatever.

And if you don’t FORCE yourself, well, you’re a bad person and you’re going to be punished…

Fuck that in the fucking face, is my carefully studied opinion. That mindset of forcing yourself and others to fit into a specific shape that feels awful is not the way to go about changing peole at all. Maybe in the beginning, like when raising kids or if someone is just starting to learn how to be in the world, but not as a free adult.

How to Actually Change Hearts

You have to show people and help them know on a deep level that doing the right thing will also make them feel good. There is something in this for you as well!

Not just in a cheesy, fake sort of “do the right thing” way, but deeply right—when you take the Correct and Right path, your body/mind/soul aligns with the Tao, or the Universe, or God, or whatever. On the deepest level, you enter the flow state and become greater than you were.

Because as we know from the behaviorists (and just basic logic), if you try to force people to do something they don’t want to do, it’s going to be extremely inefficient. Instead, if you show people how doing something is good for them, everything goes much better. It’s easier to convince people, and more importantly it’s MUCH easier for them to stay on the path.

For some reason, we seem to have lost this understanding across all sorts of domains—working out, nutrition, medicine as a whole, and religion especially. It’s like we’ve become convinced that the world hates us, and we have to constantly fight against it to be happy. We aren’t allowed to just relax into it because unspecified bad things will happen.

For instance, the reason workout discourse is so divisive is that people mean extremely different things by “workout.” One person can “work out” and just be straining, clenching all their muscles tortuously the whole time, whereas another might be feeling the beautiful freedom of movement.

I’ve been on both sides of this fence! When I was dealing with chronic pain, I would force myself to exercise for an hour a day and I hated it. I had no idea why people would do it for fun.

Then, as I started to let go of the chronic tension and self-coercion, I started to realize, wait this feels amazing! I began to learn to glory in movement for it’s own sake, and now I work out because I genuinely want to. It’s a million times better.

Maybe this is part of what people mean when they say God is dead... maybe it’s because we’ve decided that He is evil and wrong and bad, His Creation is evil and wrong and bad, and the only way to survive is to constantly fight against Him.

We’ve become so cynical we can’t even imagine a world where it feels good to do the right thing—where goodness is a property of the universe that you can align to, not something you have to force yourself to contort toward.

Yet I promise you, that world exists! In the words of St. Isaac the Syrian:

“Make peace with yourself, and both heaven and earth will make peace with you.”