Well another New Year is upon us. 2014 has ended. It has been a long year for many people. But now it is time to contemplate what we want to create for the New Year. The holidays are over and the quiet reality of 2015 is just now sinking in. Do we look forward to new beginnings, new goals, and anticipations of what wonderful opportunities life will present us? Or shall we see the work ahead of us and hunker down to meet the job head on? .
This is not a frivolous question. It reflects two basically different ways of viewing life. It is similar to the comparison between the optimist and the realist/pessimist. In this case it is the difference between how our heart sees life and how our head sees life. The heart lives in the state of the anticipation of abundance, variety, change, and play. The head is concerned with getting the realities of life dealt with so that we will survive. The heart is full of fluffy joyful connections. The head can’t even relate to such feelings and finds the whole idea disconcerting. The head thinks all that heart stuff is bunk and simply an attempt to avoid the work that needs to be done. The heart knows that the head has completely missed the whole point of being alive.
The cool thing is that we all have heads and we all have hearts. We all have a part that can savor and appreciate the joy of life and we also have a part that makes sure that we don’t end up as road kill. When these two parts work together hand in hand life becomes dynamic and creative. When these two parts battle each other for control we end up very unhappy. Most people have a battle on their hands because of old cultural and family judgments favoring one side or the other. In truth this conflict makes as much sense as your liver and your stomach battling for control. Each have their part to play in the body just as the heart and the head have their parts to play in our life.
Survival stuff is always around. Just about every day involves some level struggle to make ends meet, get food on the table, and provide some level of safety for ourselves and our family. This is normal. Life is designed to involve struggle. Without the work expended to overcome obstacles we get weak and die. This is true inside our bodies as much as it is in our outside life. We as humans are not designed to live in fairy tale stories where everything is effortless and given to us by magic so we can live happily ever after. The part of us that remembers the feelings of being in the womb where every day was lived like this wants to believe we can recreate that totally provided for state of happiness. But from the moment we take our first breath, we are on a different path – a path of self-creation and manifestation. We can’t go back.
So what do we want to create for 2015? By that what I really mean is what self-development challenges do we want to take on? We are here to bring our uniqueness into expression in a way that harmonizes and supports all of life. We want to look beyond the simple goals of survival like getting a more reliable car, or joining a gym or trying once again to lose that extra flab. We are interested here in what moves our heart into greater expression. Do we take up singing in the local choir? Do we try out a new artistic expression? Do we join a different social organization to make connection with new people? Maybe we want to focus on our garden, or perhaps volunteer to help out at our kid’s school.
Self-creation involves stepping into the unknown from a state of trust and vulnerability to try something new. Life is a trial and error process. Life is not about certainty. Growth requires us to trust ourselves enough to be willing to fail and learn from our mistakes so we can do “it” a little bit better next time. Who you are inside is a huge unknown. To bring it into manifestation you have to be willing to feel your way around. You have to have the courage and strength to be vulnerable to that unknown. That is the only way to expand into new areas of yourself. To be vulnerable is to feel what is as you encounter it. You can only anticipate the known. To grow the deep unknown potentials within yourself you have to let go of preconceptions and be vulnerable enough to directly feel who you are as you stretch into new areas of expression.
This may sound like a pretty sketchy way of approaching things. Our head wants to draw from our past experiences and project into the future any plans we may have for ourselves. That is a useful skill when you are planning a holiday dinner filled with your holiday favorites. But this approach totally fails when you want to unfold and expand yourself into new arenas. Being new means you have no history to call upon with which to project plans into the future. Growth means setting sail without having anything more than a vague feeling of what your heart is being drawn towards today. Tomorrow may be a different direction all together. Without vulnerability, you don’t take in all the new information your journey offers and you don’t feel your authentic response to that new information.
This is the protocol for growth – feel your attraction, move toward it a bit and feel what is, feel your authentic response to what is, course correct based on that response, and move forward again. You don’t know what you don’t know, so moving forward is a step by step process of feeling and responding. Did the step forward feel good / feel right? If it did then take another step forward. If it didn’t then creatively come up with a different step to take – try something a little differently. You are literally discovering who you are through trial and error. As your direction becomes more clear you focus on developing the skills necessary to feel fluid and competent in your new expression. These same steps apply whether you are learning a new musical instrument or volunteering in a new capacity or learning to roller-skate.
Most of us limit our unfoldment and expression because we feel we are not enough. It is a super common feeling, which seems to come from being judged by others or our own misperception of perfection. But the feeling is built on a lie. The lie is that somehow it is our job to be what someone else wants us to be. We buy into this lie because we get it that if we are the way they want us to be, they will provide us with stuff we want. This is the deviltry of the really big lies, they are half-true. People will give us stuff we want, like attention, food, shelter, a wage, if we show up for them the way they want. That is the basis of all commerce. The lie is in the belief that it is our job to be what they want instead of seeing that we choose to do this because it serves us. It is not our job to be anything other than who we are, and there is nothing wrong with who we are not meeting “their” wants for us. It just means there is no exchange. We are enough being who we are to engage life and create connections and participation that works for us and serves us. We may not be “enough” for some other person to give us what we want, but we are still enough in ourselves to be worthy of fully engaging life.
.
So this is my message for 2015 – engage life fully, you are worthy of the best you can create in this New Year. You are enough just as you are to fully enjoy what life offers you and you are still full of enough mystery and potential to have a wild time enjoying all the new expressions of your life you choose to jump into.
Take care,
David