Beehives and Barriers: Why You Don't Sing Anymore

When I was in the Boy Scouts I learned that if you don’t provoke bees, they will just let you be.

I’m not sure I bought that completely, seeming how bees always seemed to me to be just on the verge of wanting to sting your ass.

So when we were setting out on a hike the idea of the beehive ahead of us made a few of us pause.

I was part of that pause.

Freeze Frame.

I will come back to my youthful beehive hike shortly.

I want to tell you about something that sits in your mind that is representative of that beehive.

And this thing that sits in your mind is a specific kind of energy called charge.

Some of you who are reading this have previously been introduced to Mr. Charge somewhere in your misadventures in life. I would venture to say, although the introduction was possibly testy at first, you are now very glad you understand how he works.

And because of your new found understanding, you live a much happier life.

And if you care to help out a fellow traveler, pass this article along so those you know and love might understand who and what Mr. Charge is, how he operates, so they too can live better lives as well.

Now, except in very specific texts on physics and religious philosophy, this charge in your mind is not usually a topic of conversation at the family dinner table.

But interestingly enough, charge is always present at the family dinner table, even if on the back burner.

Charge comes from physics. And all you need to know is something like your battery has a positive or negative charge, right?

End of physics lesson.

Are we good?

But lets translate that to you driving on the freeway and some crazy person oblivious to you, cuts you off in the lane you’re in, and swear-to-god almost hits you.

Your heart rate skyrockets.

Your adrenaline spikes.

And you’re screaming bloody murder yelling the F-word at the top of your lungs from inside your car.

That’s charge.

Still with me?

See, part of your mind, the reactive part, stores this charge like squirrels store nuts for the winter.

Ever talk to someone about a relationship break-up they’re going through or they’re beefed about a business partner that screwed them over?

I mean two thirds of what you’re experiencing in their retelling, is how much charge they have on that incident.

You might say, “Well, of course. You should be pissed about getting screwed over.”

Pissed, yes.

But not five weeks or five months later.

The crazy thing about charge is it’s cumulative.

Every single time you have reached out to be something, do something or have something and were invalidated or stopped, you deposited a nice teeny-tiny bit of charge in your reactive bank account.

Growing up you decided you wanted to learn to how to play the piano.

You thought it would be cool to play like Beethoven or Elton John.

So you began to practice.

But when you hit the wrong key?

Charge.

And you hit the wrong key, again?

More charge.

Then while you’re practicing your ass off and you’re doing great and you’re feeling like Mozart's got nothing on you, damn if you don’t hit another wrong key.

Your Mom yells from the kitchen, “You need to focus more, Tommy. You keep hitting that sharp key.”

Fuck you, Mom.

Charge, charge, and more charge.

Sometimes you get so charged up you decide:

Fuck. This. I. Quit.

The real villainy in this whole thing is not that you have these deposits of charge stored in your mind. That’s nutty enough.

The real craziness is that charge cuts your reach to create.

What does this mean?

It means simply this:

Reaching means you are extending yourself outward to another or others with something you have created or are creating.

If Mrs. Smith, a high school teacher is teaching, she is trying to reach her class about the importance of US History.

And let’s say in any given day Mrs. Smith is getting some really nasty and covert ridicule from one or two students.

They’re just plain-ass rude.

They think US History is bullshit.

Mrs. Smith knows these types and deals with them as best she can, but after awhile the ridicule and rudeness begins to cut her reach.

Do you see this?

She will think, “This is not what I signed up for.”

If you multiply this rude conduct by a handful of students over time, you will see this effect of the charge building up in Mrs. Smith.

After a year of this and another rude kid makes a cynical comment, what do you think Mrs. Smith’s response might be, despite all the official decorum she’s supposed to keep as a teacher?

Exactly.

She might just go all postal like you did when you were screamin’ at the dude who cut you off on the freeway.

Or down the road she might quit.

And remember, I said charge is cumulative.

Your boyfriend lies to you.

That moment is delicately charged, yes?

Then a week later he lies again.

Your charge now moves out of the delicate category to almost Defcon 5 charge.

But you work through this and you and he are doing great.

Then a couple of weeks down the road you find a text on his cell phone to another girl that shows he was lying to you.

Now the Radiation Sirens are blaring from Chernobyl.

Okay, so, ummmm...do we understand cumulative charge?

Alright.

Back to the bees.

When I went on the above mentioned hike with the Boy Scouts I was trying to be all Master Scout Guy and be brave and shit.

Nah.

I had me some charge on bees.

But see, I was supposed to just walk on by and pay no attention to these busy buzzing bees. You know, like their buzz-saw buzzing was just some sing-songy tune from the Backstreet Boys.

Intellectually I understood what Obi Wan Kenobi was saying in my mind.

“Be One With The Bees.”

Ummmm...you be one with the fucking bees, Ben.

Now here’s another wild and crazy factoid about this beehive charge.

Your mind takes a picture about every 1/25 of a second.

So, let’s start from the time you were born and right up to this very moment, at 1/25th of a second, how many pictures do you think might contain some charge?

That’s a lotta U-Store storage space for everything from that D-minus on your Report Card, to losing your 401K to those bad boys on Wall Street.

Trust me.

You have a boatload of experiences the size of the Titanic that have charge sitting there.

And here’s the real killer:

Every time you went down a creative path and were stopped, suppressed, or inhibited about what you were reaching out to create, you have charge at every single point this occurred.

Every. Single. Point.

Ever proofread and type up a proposal for your boss and pulled an all-nighter to get it done? That thing was a masterpiece when you finished. You give it to him in the morning and he says, “I told you I wanted this double spaced.”

You’re trying to smile, but you have so much beehive charge you want to take your French nails and leave your signature etched across his bossy-face.

Ever go over to someone’s house and you notice they have a piano and you sit down at it because hello...this piano is like old friend you had shared some hopes and dreams with?

You’re off in your imagination watching yourself playing Brahms or something and your friend comes over and breaks your reverie and says… 

“Oh...do you play?!”

They’re all excited because they bought that piano for their daughter to play, but she’s gone off to college.

So now here you sit.

Your friend is so excited that someone, namely you, will play for them.

And you look at them with some suppressed anxiety and embarrassment.

As they look at you expectantly, your mind wanders for a split second recalling a memory of when you did play.

But the memory of recital mistakes, admonishments, and the criticisms that built up around your ability to play, now hold you in beehive hostage.

So you answer… “No...not really. I use to.”

Then there’s this awkward silence between you and your friend.

Your friend was hoping to hear those melodious keys come alive in her home.

And your hope was momentarily alive, but overruled by the all the barnacles of charge suffocating your soul.

And what about your singing?

Don’t worry. I didn’t forget.

It’s just I knew you were in the shower.

I won’t tell, but sometimes you sing in the shower, yes?

And boy, can you sing.

At Christmas time your parents tell your aunts and uncles around the dinner table, “You should hear Cindy sing.”

And you sit there at the dinner table turning red and doing one of those nervous embarrassed head shakes, when all their heads turn and look at you smiling expectantly.

The charge from all of the times you sang a wrong note, or weren’t as good as Eileen in voice class, come swarming up inside your head like a bad beehive.

Your mind-beehive is sitting there ominously.

But here’s the truth:

No real bees are bothering you.

They sure sound ominous, though.

All the voices and sound bites from former teachers and “friends” and recitals about your less than best performances, are just buzzing away.

That’s a beehive of charge.

And this beehive charge is offering up an unsettling reminder:

“Remember what it’s like to get stung?”

And maybe it did sting when you sang in your 5th grade class as they laughed and snickered at you. So you cried yourself to sleep that night and swore then you’d never sing again.

Maybe it stung when your voice coach said, “Maybe you should try playing the clarinet instead.”

Yes, those stung.

But those are old beehives. They are not actually alive now.

And the Catch-22 in all of this is that when you put your attention on those stings, they do come alive.

They are like solar cells on the top of a toy truck.

That toy truck won’t move until you put it in the sun.

But, the big mistake that people make is when you look back at the ridicule and invalidations that stir up that beehive charge, you now have a default setting of doing something other than the action that has charge on it.

That’s the Catch-22.

So you don’t play the piano.

You hold to your 5th grade decision to not sing.

When we did take that path with my Boy Scout troop, we actually walked straight ahead and I’ll be damned if those bees just let us be.

It was truly all in my head.

So when you are up against these beehive barriers, they are as real as you give them your energy and life.

But then you have turned over your power of choice and self-determinism to your mind-hive.

You have abdicated your own free will based on imagined fear.

On our hike, we did have the choice to avoid or walk straight ahead.

And yes, you can politely avoid not playing the piano or tell your beehive to go to hell, and play.

Some people know they could have been artists or singers or gone into a more creative field. They became accountants or some other profession because this was just a path with a whole lot less beehive traffic.

But I assure you, when Cindy the successful accountant comes home after a long day at work, she’ll pour herself a glass of Kendall Jackson and go out on her balcony to relax.

In the distance she hears someone playing Brahms.

She closes her eyes and drifts off to a time not to long ago.

Where she was on that path too.

If you have put aside some creative ability or talent, I pose to you to look at when you were in full create mode and what kind of beehives you ran into.

And just to keep you honest between us Scouts, you will now have justifications and “reasons” as to why you don’t paint or sing or play anymore.

But the truth is, it’s all in your head.

But you can choose to not let it dictate your actions and go ahead and tell your friend,

“Yes...yes, I do play.”

She will say, “Will you then play something for me?”

And go ahead and play.

And I guarantee you this:

Even if you make a mistake she won’t call you out on it.

That’s just the Beehive talking.

She will be so happy to hear those melodious keys played in her living room.

And so will you.

Believe it or not, there is a way to get rid of these pockets of charge.

I provide a free questionnaire that isolates exactly where these areas of charge exist in your mind. The test will show how the accumulation of charge has affected your self-confidence, your abilities at work, and exactly where you are having difficulties in you marriage or relationship.

It is extremely accurate and eye-opening.

But just remember.

Charge cuts reach.

If you think about taking the test and you’ve taken tests before or you have charge on tests because “they’re not accurate,” or “this is not really a test but just a pitch,” then you won’t take the test.

Here’s the link if you are interested in taking the test and having a free phone consultation to go over your results.

Free Phone Consultation with Dave Worthen