Life has more pitfalls and twists than our tribal ideologies failed to reveal. All too often I hear, “Looking for a quick fix.” My head nods and my mind races to warn, “There is no such thing.” There are no short cuts to a healthy, happy, vibrant life.
We had a few (shortcuts) in our youth but if your reading this those days are gone. Putting in the daily grind is the only way to succeed. Our relationships take time: the good ones; lots of time. Our careers take years in shaping and honing then years to make us experts.
A healthy-lean body takes discipline along with pain, sweat and tears, and good food. Our emotional wealth takes years of good literature, self-help, Nature and therapy. Hard work is a requirement to a path of enlightenment and self-examination.
Break-throughs are as important as a pay-check. In fact pay checks and dividends alone won’t make us happy. Peeling back the personal layers of societal baggage happens after we suffer. Let me say that again a different way.
Uncovering who you are only happens when you experience pain…!!!
Why must we suffer in order to wake up? So we see as we have not seen before and hear what we have never heard. Suffering makes us stop, makes us pause, makes us feel, our breath, our heart beat, our stillness. And we never forget, because it’s painful and you rarely forget pain.
We need betrayal, death, loss of a job, loss of life, loss of a limb, loss of a partner or spouse, loss of a child: to feel; then wake up. Wake up to what? We often say!!! We will know once it happens because we won’t be able to go back to sleep.
If we want to stay right where we are: word of warning — don’t fall in love with literature, books, novels. They will change us, they will expand our world far from the one we grew up in. Just like a healthy body; this will take time, even years to have an effect, but it will happen.
To think and to ask a question differently than the ones we were taught takes curiosity. Being ready for a new answer, or truth, requires an open mind, taking action requires courage. Pain is the catalyst, pain is the key to unlocking the door to understanding who we are.
Pain absolves our stuff, our things, the house, the car — pain will make it vanish, all of it, we will be left with a blank canvas. We lose interest in material things because they lose value. We realise they never brought happiness.
Paradoxically material pursuits leave us wanting more because more makes us burdened and stressed and unhappy. What makes us happy is staying connected, being with loved ones, activities of an intrinsic nature.
Playing and laughing while singing and dancing, painting, pottering, walking, gardening, cooking, sharing, helping each other and creating are all intrinsic and feed happiness. Extrinsic activities draw us away from each other, disconnect, outward, alien, foreign, superficial.
When we look at it this way we can see why there is so much unhappiness, depression and anxiety. We have lost our community our connection. Society has convinced us it is better to get stuff, to buy things, to shop for more and we lose ourselves and our joy and happiness.
This is not our true nature when we stop and think about what we want. Knowing what we want requires self-worth and large amounts of self-esteem. The reason is simple: so many of our loved ones tell us what to do and how to live life. This bleeds within each of our cultures, our tribes, our traditions, and what we see and hear everywhere.
We are distracted and influenced into being and doing what we are not. It takes self-love to gather our spirit and inner voice into one place — within us. Rather it being scattered in others that have power over us. Their power over us is because we gave it to them. Unconsciously!!!
Listening to what friends say, family members, how we live, where we work, gives them power over our choices. Most have not made choices without an influence of some kind. Our voice is silent and fragmented because our tribal traditions own us.
Gathering our power, our voice is vital in living with integrity and ownership of our choices. The only thing we own and control is our choices. But we must restore our fragmentation to wholeness. This can take years or months depending on our willingness to let go and our recognition of our ego.
Back to: “I want a quick fix.” Its child-like in lack of: depth and understanding and wisdom. The wanting is like a demand and the quick relating to speed — another way of saying this, “Give it to me now…”
There are no shortcuts to wholeness, be it physical, emotional or spiritual.
We deserve the space to recognise our potential for a happy life. No one will give this to us. Only we can garner the wisdom and knowledge that leads to strength to follow our heart so we can blaze our own trail. Achieving our potential is the reason for our existence, the journey will guide us there.
