I have the capacity to experience intense and overwhelming happiness, rageful frustration, expansive joy and compassion, grief filled sadness, deep gratitude, fiery resentment, liberated expressiveness, paralysing shyness, robust confidence, acute self-doubt, passionate determination, crippling shame, inspired creativity and a low lying dissatisfaction with life. And this is just to name a few of my experiences of being a human being on planet earth.
I remember attending one of my first courses on happiness with my wonderful brother in law, Robert Holden and it was the first time I had really come in to contact with a human being that would tell me something about my experience as Lizzie. Robert said that our emotions are only there to be felt, they are here to be felt and listened to. They are intelligent and if we accept that they are welcome in our experience, and we do not fight them, they can move through us and they do not have to be the sole determinant of our happiness.
When I deeply asked myself what I had asked for in life, I realised that I have always asked for a FULL life - which, when I look more closely, means that I have signed up to receive the full experience of being a human being. And a human being is about so many different emotions, thoughts, experiences, sensations, learnings, relationships. If I signed up to them all, who am I to decide which experiences, emotions or thoughts are good and which are bad. My job is to accept them all and be a vessel, be someone who welcomes whatever experience I am having and then I get to learn from it.
From what I can tell, from my own life, and the lives of all the people I have coached, taught, been in relationship with in some way, we all experience highs and lows, ups and downs. Things go 'right' for us and things go 'wrong' for us. People die. We get promoted. We lose jobs. We fall in love. We split up. We are wealthy. We have little money. And most of us go through the whole range of experience in one lifetime. Depending on these outside circumstances being 'favourable' seems such a flimsy thing to rely on. Who knows what's going to happen to us next ? What if there is a deeper contact we can make with ourselves, with life, that we might remain in touch and deeply connected to something that's more real, more reliable, more consistent than the situations we find ourselves faced with in life ?
This feels is a life long enquiry for me - and one that I have been reflecting on ever since I saw that there was something else to life, other than my interpretations of the situations or circumstance I find myself in. There was me. I was always there. I was the common denominator for everything that happened in my life. And I had never really changed. I could feel my 'Lizzieness' when I looked at any situation in the past and any circumstance that I find myself in today, it's still here.
This sense of me, of my essence that supports me, stands by me, holds me, sees me, is always here - and it always will be. And I can trust this. I am going to be with myself until I die (and possibly beyond!) and this feels to me like the only thing I can know for sure. That there is a source of me - and I suspect that this is the source of everyone else too - which is the ground of being that I so crave, and that I try and find in others, in experiences, in things, in objects. I am what I am always looking for - and how many times a day do I forget to look to me for that which I seek in the world ? About a million probably.
What if I were to interpret the events of the day in a different way than usual. What if, instead of orienting myself to my life in a way that has events 'happen to me', I decided to experiment with the approach that everything happens in my best interest? What if I saw my mac breaking down (which it die a few weeks ago) as something that was entirely in my favour ? What if it's just what I needed right when it happened? How far will my mind open to accept this as a possibility and truly experiment with it ? Am I capable of this ? I'm giving it a good go and I wonder what I will learn.
I am willing to see things differently, I am willing to find the gift, however frustrating it has the potential to be. I am willing.
It looks unlikely that we are going to go through life with a seamless perfection of happiness, peace, abundance and well being. At the very least we'll have flu or we'll fall over, or someone will die. And of course many other things may happen over the course of our life. What if this experience is all my interpretation, and I am a powerful human being who can choose how to see the world and all that happens in it ? What if all that happens to me is happening for me ? What if there is a curriculum here, a lifetime of learning, that's lined up for us ? What if we lived like this as a big experiment and saw the difference in the qualities of life we experience in this human body ?
I am saying all of this because sometimes bringing ourselves and our dreams to life, in the Sacred and Rebellious may that we are talking about might not be easy, we might not always be met in our cutting edge, passionate ideas. The world might not be ready for us. Our families may be frightened for us, as we follow our joy instead of the career path that's laid out in their heads. What if we were able to face these challenges because we knew they were lessons? What if we met the obstacles as learning points and wisdom givers rather than blocks and set backs ?
We know that the 'great' people of our world didn't have it easy - look at Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Marc Zuckerberg, Mahatma Ghandi, Steve Jobs - find anyone you admire who has done something amazing in the world - and look at the challenges they faced, look at what they overcame to realise their dreams and you'll see that none of us have it 'easy' - it's how we face the hurdles that matters.
No comments:
Post a Comment