Oops…Deleted!

On Friday my blog for today was complete and I sat down at my PC, cutting it from Word and pasting it into my website. I left out a piece and inadvertently deleted what I had pasted into the website and when I got back to my Word document I discovered that I had inadvertently deleted that!

I then tried a system restore on my PC to try and get back the document and failed.

My first reaction was to panic. “Oh my God” I thought to myself, “I don’t want to have to redo this again!”

And then I just sat back for a moment and watched myself panicking and resisting having to redo it and then just walked away from my PC and let the whole situation just simmer in the background.

I realised that I just wasn’t into doing the rewrite so then the question came up, “What to do next?” I didn’t have the answer and I remembered an amazing comment from Adyashanti, “If you don’t know what to do, perhaps now isn’t the time to know!”

So I just thought I’d leave it for now and notice what came up and I relaxed completely.

Stop Trying To Make It Happen

That’s a wonderful thing to do in your life.

Just notice all of the decisions that you are trying to make about the future that you can’t make now and the reason might be that now is not the time to make them and when the time comes you will be able to make them.

When you do this you relax and you enable the decision to come up more spontaneously and potentially far more creatively.

Within half an hour I realised that what I wanted to do was talk about what had happened, which is what you do if you arrive to do a presentation and your PowerPoint slides don’t work or you lose your notes, you just talk from your heart about what’s happening.

I had a friend who did that one time and she got the most amazing response to the talk, probably better than if she’d given the pre-planned one.

Don’t Push River

There is this wonderful book title Don’t push the river it flows by itself.

The book is terrible so don’t bother to read it, but the title says it all.

21st century lifestyle is all about taking control of life, it’s pushing driving and striving to make things happen and this has multiple benefits.

Perhaps the greatest example of this in business is Steve jobs and look what he has given us. Of course it might have killed him but certainly he produced the smart phone and the iPad which have been great contributions to our society.

I love the way westerners go to Mount Everest to conquer it. The Nepalese Sherpa’s have an entirely different attitude. They surrender to it and honour it rather than trying to ‘conquer’ it.

In essence we push too hard to achieve things to make them happen and the cost is stress and dis-ease and great impatience and discontent.

It’s just more and more of the control thing, trying to exert our personal will on the world. We lose our sense of flow, the ability to move gracefully in time with the rhythms of life and nature.

Nina Twombly

I read this really wonderful blog recently by Nina Twombly, a Barbara Brennan healer whom I consulted recently. She says that we tend to suffer from a lack of absorption. Which is the inability to take in energy. So we are always doing things, acting on the world to make things happen.

Absorption is a return on your investment of time and energy. So we are endlessly getting things done and then we celebrate success for a very short time but we don’t absorb all of the energy and the quality of the goodness around us and through our actions and so are endlessly dissatisfied.

This striving and pushing is lopsided.

This lack of absorption creates anxiety, depression, fatigue, meaninglessness and irritability.

Tibet

My sister did a trek through Tibet many years ago with her husband. When they returned they gave us a slideshow of their tour. The one thing I remember was that the Tibetans mostly build their houses out of stone because when they live above the tree line that’s the only thing that they have with which to build their homes. So if they want to build a house out of wood they plant poplar trees, specifically for this purpose and then they wait 30 years for them to grow before they build the house!

Contrast this with someone in our culture whose bricks aren’t delivered on a Monday for their new home and they have a monumental tantrum about it.

Once the home is built, the really great question one can ask is, “How much of the time do you really absorb the pleasure and joy of your beautiful new home?”

Cultivating Wisdom

In my Self-Esteem work I have a concept called Cultivating Wisdom. In essence I’m saying that we have belief systems which drive our Self-Esteem into the ground. It is conditioned and trained by our culture.

So we believe we are not good enough unless we are working 18 hours a day and driving ourselves to exhaustion and being the best that we can be. Why, I might ask, is it such a crime to not do the best you can be?

I’m not saying it isn’t wonderful to fulfil your potential but we are so anxious about not fulfilling our potential that we push and drive ourselves into oblivion and then where is the time to absorb the joy and the beauty and the love of life and our achievements.

We cannot savour and feel the blessings of this existence. It is all a race against time to achieve as much as we can to reach the summit, the pinnacle of possibility.

This is what we revere, those are the heroes that we love, the great achievers of our culture.

For many of us it is very difficult to absorb the goodness around us because we are so habituated to grasping desperately towards more and more pleasure. Better food, more love, more entertainment, wanting, wanting, wanting, endlessly.

This wanting is contracted and tight and so it doesn’t fulfil us for long.

What I suggest you try doing is notice the fast moving and excited contraction towards wanting more pleasure and then see if you can let go into its polar opposite, expansion and lightness, a softening and resting and simply allowing the goodness to come to you, the goodness that is already here.

If you would like to explore any personal issues evoked by this blog, either face to face or via Skype, please mail me at realmark@icon.co.za