Stutz by Jonah Hill is a movie worth seeing

Stutz is the name of Jonah Hill’s Psychiatrist, and Hill created a documentary on Netflix to popularize Dr. Stutz’s techniques for managing mental health and operating at peak resourcefulness.

The movie is 96 minutes long, and learning about Dr. Stutz’s techniques in the context of the documentary is incredibly valuable.

Practicing the techniques requires a little more time. Here what I’ve attempted to do is outline each of the techniques. I found it valuable to have a reference to use after the movie. This does not replace the movie, you should definitely watch the movie, but you can use this list to familiarize yourself with the techniques before watching and as a reference afterwards.

Life Force

The first steps to becoming resourceful and overcoming are to understand and build your life force, which you experience on three levels

At the lowest level is your relationship with your physical body. Get your body working better through exercise, diet, and sleep, everything else can start falling into place. No bullshit. Just exercise, eat healthy, and get enough sleep. Just do it. Start with exercise. Today.

The second level is your relationship with other people. When people get depressed they pull back from their lives, but your relationships and interactions with other people are like handholds that pull you back into life, and you have to take the initiative, no one else is going to for you. Invite someone to lunch or snack. Just having a conversation face to face, even if it’s with someone you don’t find interesting, will affect you in a positive way.

The highest level is the relationship with yourself. Get yourself in a relationship with your self conscious. Do this through writing. Take time every day to write something down, anything. Because writing is a mirror and things will come out that you don’t even know you knew.

Build your life force by

1. exercising, eating right, and getting enough sleep
2. interacting with others one on one in person
3. writing something every day

Part X

Part X is the judgmental part of you, an invisible force that wants to keep you from growing or changing, block your evolution and potential.

Whatever you need to do, it will tell you that’s impossible, it creates this primal fear in human beings

If you know that Part X is part of you, you can use Stutz’s tools and your life force to stay resourceful and recover from Part X’s tricks.

You can defeat Part X temporarily but it’s always going to keep coming back. Part X uses whatever is happening to you and twists it to make its point, which is why you need the tools to keep on moving forward.

3 Aspects of Reality

We all have to come to grips with three aspects of reality, and when we accept these with discernment and not judgment, we move on and can be resourceful.

1. Pain: There will always be pain.
2. Uncertainty: There will always be uncertainty.
3. Constant work: There will always be constant work.

Part X takes these three aspects of reality and catastrophizes them. But if we banished pain, uncertainty, and constant work, there would be no progress. What actually makes us happy is the process of dealing with these. When we start to understand that the worse the adversity, the greater the opportunity, and that the highest expression of a human being is to create something new in the face of adversity, we control our own happiness.

These three constants mean that we cannot move forward without being vulnerable. Acknowledging and accepting the possibility of failure and weakness is actually a connector; it sends a signal to the rest of the world that we are connected and need each other. We become motivated when we take on the pain, uncertainty, and work with an outlook of, “let’s have some fun” and “whatever happens, it will be epic.”

Life is actually being grounded in these three constants and reaching for the stars at the same time, it’s giving yourself over to something that you don’t, and can’t, fully understand.

String of Pearls tool

Despite the lies that our Part X tells us about the way the 3 aspects of reality impact our life, we have to keep going.

The analogy is a building a string of pearls.

You have this string, and you attach one pearl, and then you keep going and you attach another pearl, and so on. But inside of each pearl there is also this black dot, and this black dot is a turd. And the turd just shows you that it’s not just this beautiful pearl, nothing is perfect, and that’s just the way of life.

But you keep on going and stringing those pearls; you put the next pearl on the string. Each pearl represents one action. You do something, and whatever it is there is beauty to it and also a turd. And you move on to the next pearl.

Each action has the same value. You did this. It was a big failure. Or it was a big success. Either way, you’ve got to keep going and put the next pearl on the string. True confidence is living in uncertainty and moving forward.

The winner is not the one who makes the best decisions or looks the best. The winner is the one who puts the next pearl on the string; who interacts with some degree of faith and then eats the consequences; if the consequences are bad, you gotta work the cycle again; if the consequences are good, you keep working the cycle; either way you put the next pearl on the string.

The Shadow

The shadow is the version of you that you want to hide from the world the most. It never goes away. It’s part of you. It helped make you who you are.

The more you try to hide it, the more it fights back and makes you notice it. All it wants is for you to notice it, acknowledge it, accept it, and love it.

Everybody has a shadow, it’s the part of themselves they’re ashamed of. To stop the shadow from embarrassing you and sabotaging your actions, you need to find it and see it and then have a conversation with it. Like this:

1. Visualize a time in your life when you felt inferior, embarrassed, rejected, despondent , that you’re ashamed of it. It’s the part of you that you wish you were not. But you are. That’s your shadow.
2. Ask your shadow, “how do you feel about me? How do you feel about the way I’ve dealt with you?”
3. Ask your shadow, “how do you feels about that?”
4. Ask your shadow, “what can I do to make up for the ract that I didn’t pay attention to your for such a long time?”

The goal in life is not to be perfect, not to give a good performance. When you do not accept your shadow as a part of you that made you what you are and that is still part of you, you are only performing, not living.

When you accept the shadow as part of you, you are whole. Wholeness means you don’t need anything else, you are good the way your are, and it’s very freeing.

Once you become content with your true self, others’ opinions affect you way, way less. And you are much better able to just accept whatever happens and move on to attach the next pearl.

The snapshot tool

Most people have this illusion that things will be good once we achieve (something, whatever it is). That’s a snapshot, it’s a snapshot of what we believe is perfection. But it’s in the realm of illusion, and it’s part of the lies that Part X tells us.

You cripple yourself with it; you fantasize about it: the perfect spouse, the perfect job, etc. We either don’t achieve it, or when we do, we find that it isn’t so perfect, it doesn’t get rid of our feelings of need, and either way then we get depressed, anxious, angry.

You can’t forget the three aspects of reality; pain will never go away, there will always be uncertainty, and we will always need to work. We accept reality, we attach the pearl to the string, and we just move on to the next pearl. It’s the process of attaching that pearl that makes us happy, not the results.

The maze

The maze always involves other people, like, “I’ll move past this once they do this.” You feel they mistreated you, it wasn’t fair, your quest for fairness puts your life on hold. Understand one thing: you’re not ever going to get whatever you think you need from them. You’ll be waiting and on hold forever. You never get that time back, and you are stuck in the maze.

You get out of the maze with love and forgiveness. The love and forgiveness is not about them, it’s what you need to move forward and attach another pearl. You get your satisfaction from the exercise of love and forgiveness called active love.

Here are the steps:

1. Close your eyes.
2. Imagine you’re surrounded by a universe completely made out of love. Don’t prejudge it and see what happens.
3. It’s a world that’s almost dense with loving energy. Feel yourself taking in all that love. Gently and firmly place all of it in your heart. Now you’re the principal leader of love in the whole universe.
4. Imagine this person you’re angry at, you despise, you hate.
5. You send all that love you’ve concentrated to that person. You feel, not just see, you feel your love enter that other person’s body. For a minute you become one.
6. You feel, if I can become one with this bastard, I can become one with anybody. And that feels like mastery.

Remember, this is not for the other person. It’s to make you feel whole and to free you from the maze so you can move forward. What it comes down to is, would you rather be right or do you want to create something. Waiting to be right is being stuck in the maze.

Radical acceptance

Radical acceptance is squeezing all the good out of something that goes wrong, finding something meaningful. Finding the strength to say, what am I going to do about this now.

In the process of radical acceptance,

1. you will think about something that did not turn out well, or something that you are afraid will not turn out well. In this process, you are not allowed to make judgments, you’re not allowed to tell yourself anything negative. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something negative there, it’s just that you’re not allowed to go through that part of it.
2. Find something positive about it. There is something there that’s valuable. Have faith in that and its value.
3. Feel the positive energy of that value.

When you start to look at all events as having value, you’re in the zone of tremendous opportunity.

The light on the other side of clouds

This is like you’re in a plane taking off and it’s cloudy and dark. And you even think, that’s the way it’s always going to be! And you start going through the clouds and you can’t see a thing. You don’t know where you are and where you’re going. And then you get above the clouds and there’s the sun, and it’s bright with blue skies.

This is a metaphor for not judging your experience of reality on the last 5 minutes.

The sun is always up there, and the cloud is always here blocking the sun. And the job of Part X is to convince you it’s always going to be that way. And the tools are to give you the perspective that you can get out of the way of the cloud, go above the cloud, or wait for the weather to change, but whichever way you choose, you’ll keep moving forward and the sun is going to be out again.

You can never reason with Part X about the sun being there. It’s faith. Radical acceptance is one tool, and Grateful flow is another.

Grateful Flow

Part x places the cloud so you can’t see the sun. You penetrate the cloud with gratefulness

Gratefulness gives you the feeling that there’s always something up there positive even if you can’t see it

The grateful flow is the process of initiating the feeling of gratefulness, it’s not the things you’re grateful for. Here is the exercise:

1. Say 2, 3, or at most 4 of the things you are grateful for. The smaller the thing the better because it forces you to concentrate gratefulness. You want to do it nice and slow. You want to feel the gratefulness.
2. Keep naming things, but don’t say them out loud, just keep streaming that strength of gratefulness. One key is not just saying the same things over and over again that you’re grateful for, you want to make it a creative act.
3. Next, you’re going to feel that your going to create another grateful thought, but you don’t. You block it so all you feel is the force that would create a grateful thought, and as it gets stronger and stronger, you feel taken over by it. You might feel as if everything slowed down.

This process will change your mood. One time to use this is when your thoughts are out of control. The worst thing you can do is argue with them.

Part x is saying don’t be grateful. You got screwed. You’ll always be screwed. Get scared it will happen again.  Get angry. Get anxious. Those are the lies.

Gratefulness is the state you want to be in as often as you can. It connects you, it’s the state that breaks through the cloud, it’s a state that gives you access to all your resourcefulness.

Loss processing

Most people are bad at processing loss. They get depressed or bereft.

Before a loss, they are worried about a loss, so they get to experience the pain even if they don’t have a loss.

The purpose of this is to get the potency of non-attachment.

When you are worried about a loss if you do something, this exercise gives you the willingness to pursue it, even pursue it really hard, but without the need to succeed. Yes, you want to succeed, but you are willing not to have that success.

Here is the procedure:

1. Pick something you feel you’ve become too attached to. Something or someone where you are anxious of letting go. Like something terrible is going to happen.
2. Imagine you are holding or grasping this thing. Like you are grasping on to a branch of a tree. You’re afraid to Let go.
3. But you let go anyway. And when you let go you start to fall. It’s not bad, the falling is kind of slow and gentle, which is a nice surprise.
4. And you say, “I’m willing to lose everything.” You say it silently, but you really feel the intent behind that.
5. And the moment you say that, you hit the surface of the sun, that was down there below you, and your body burns up.
6. At that point you have lost everything. Because the instrument of possession is your physical body. So if that burns up, you are just one sunbeam among all these other sunbeams.
7. You are radiating outward in all directions. And what you’re radiating is a very loving, giving, outflowing sensation
8. And then you look around and what you see is an infinite number of other suns, just like the one you’re inside of, all of which are radiating outwards.
9. And then you hear the suns saying in unison, “We are everywhere,”
10. This is called the sun world. All you can do is give. You can’t take. You can’t hold on to anything, you just radiate light and warmth.
11. Now open your eyes.

In this exercise, you are not trying to become non-attached. You’re moving toward non-attachment every time you get scared of a loss. It wouldn’t be good, as a human, if you were totally non-attached. It’s getting beyond the anxiety of losing the attachment. Or the depression of having lost an attachment. It’s not letting that loss or potential loss take away your whole existence and your sense of wholeness.

Rebirth after a catastrophe is always possible. From the very worst, after loss or death or the dregs of the world. And you can make something come alive again.

Epilog

We are all in the struggle, in the fight, of living as a human being. Each one of us.

None of us is exempt from the pain, the uncertainty, or the constant work.

There will never be anybody who has it all figured out.

The secret of life is realizing you won’t figure it out ever. Nobody else will figure it out. Happiness depends on how you accept that and what you do about it. What actually makes us happy is the process, putting one pearl at a time on the string.

If you're interested, my next class in Mindshifting starts January 21, 2023. It's six 90-minute sessions online. Registration and more information here.