As we become more conscious of our thoughts and emotions and look at them with kindhearted interest and curiosity, we begin to see how we armor ourselves against pain. And we see how that armor also cuts us off from the pain—and the beauty—of other people. But as we let go of our repetitive stories and fixed ideas about ourselves—particularly deep-seated feelings of “I’m not okay”—the armor starts to fall apart, and we open into the spaciousness of our true nature, into who we really are beyond our transitory thoughts and emotions. We see that our armor is made up of nothing more than habits and fears, and we begin to feel that we can let those go.
Pema Chödrön, Living Beautifully: With Uncertainty and Change
Life is a role-playing game. Yet it’s not like a conventional role-playing game.
Within a conventional role-playing game, the belief is that the stronger and heavier armour you have, the more you can defend yourself and the more successful you will be within the game.
Life doesn’t work that way.
The more you try to psychologically defend yourself and armour up, the more you are actually separating yourself from life and others.
In other words, the pain you’re experiencing is trying to teach you something. So it’s not about avoiding the pain but trying to understand what it’s trying to tell you as a growth opportunity.
Therefore, the focus of life as a role-playing game is to learn to completely drop your armour and fully embrace life, experiencing the highs and lows of it to the fullest so to understand what it means to be a human being at a deeper level (which may take a lifetime for you to do so).
So again, life works like a conventional role-playing game in reverse. By the time you reach adulthood (which is like your onboarding experience for the game of life), you’ve actually built up a lot of psychological armour which separates you from understanding and embracing life at a deeper level.
And as you progress through your life, the focus isn’t to maintain and strength that armour but to let it fall apart and fall off, revealing lighter layers of armour below which you eventually can learn to let go of as well.
Eventually late in one’s life, if one has matured and developed enough, one has completely let go of all of their psychological armour and can fully embrace life without the weight of it.
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