What I Love to Do

How many mental ties do you bind yourself with?

When I feel suppressed and suffocated, it is because I chose to harden my beliefs and thinking. Things had to be “just so”.

I box myself in,
Tie my own hands,
Summon dark clouds,
And cover any sunlight within.

When I condemn and judge instead of allowing things to “be”, I am really condemning and judging myself. I am saying to myself,

“You aren’t doing worth a damn. I don’t care if you are a good mom. You are failing in these other areas, and you aren’t making money, which is what I’m really judging your worth on.”

By reducing tolerance of the many different ways things (and people) can exist – and can express themselves – I am actually reducing the many possible ways I can exist – and can express myself.

Right now, my main form of self expression occurs through another human being – through my son. I cannot be tied to a result or force Jaden to be one way or another (nor do I want to).

My rigid, old way of thinking has made me feel miserable because it does not tolerate this new form of expression. Instead, rigid-old-thinking sees LACK of the old ways of expressing.

This is exactly why this year has been so important for me. I am shown the limits of my blindness about “who” I am in the world. I am confronting the limits of my adaptability when each day becomes truly unpredictable.

This feels like bootcamp for life: being able to live in ambiguity and still maintain my center, and realizing that I am not well grounded, and know this is what I need to work on.

In times like this, the most immediate thing I do is to do something nice for someone else. Connect with other people. Get a physical, visceral feel – a real human sense – of “we are not separate”. I can’t do that alone, in my head. For me, this has to be more than just chanting or meditating on “I am not separate from source”! I need to DO something – put energy behind this vector!

I have enjoyed my mental safety nets even as I yearn for adventure.

At times in my life, I come to a point where I start sliding down. I go with gravity and find myself hanging off the edge of a leaf with no anchor!

I fear that I fall and join the boundless water of life.

It is times like this when I come face to face with fear of unknown: when I beg to be brave and keep my eyes open as I fall, experience fears through every fiber, not knowing if this fear is shadow fear or real fear until I reach the bottom.

This can be so hard even when all I do is let gravity take me downward!

The worst prison is the one I have built for myself. I know I hold the key to my own freedom. I am accountable. I get to choose. So what am I waiting for?

Maybe right now, I can learn more from not being different. Enjoy the ordinariness of life. Maybe right now, this is my extraordinary feat.

Once I find myself in the river of life – an adventure where I don’t set the itinerary but already am in it – I can enjoy the waves carrying me forth.

I can focus on the experience that comes, look at what I am asked to respond to, instead of trying to control what I never had control over.

Being Receptive is different from Being Unconscious.

Going with the flow doesn’t mean I’ve become lazy. It means I stop battling what is not even at war with me.

The more relaxed I am, the more I can see opportunities, the more open I am to new ideas, the easier it is to create abundance.

Only then can I come face to face with the adventure I so desperately seek. The shiny newness that catches my breath the way everything elicits rapture in an infant. The feeling of my brain cells coming alive, as if my soul is the one seeing everything in sight.

Only when I become a child again, can I see as a child sees. Just like Mr. Rogers’ book, I am 36, and I am also 1, 5, 25! I am all the ages that I have been, and the current age I am. I haven’t lost it! It is still within me. The child I was is still part of who I am.

Then I end up back on the lotus leaf again, finding that I never really left. When I dropped into the river of life, thinking that I would be carried away and possibly lost forever, I really was being led back home to safety.

A Safety that is Infinite.

Photo credits: Waterfall by Tatiana Bolshakova, Torrent by Kriss Szkurlatowski, Dewdrops by kenchu.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Journey through the Heart Mind. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.