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Expectations rarely do you any good.
They tend to be a constraint for finding a sense of inner peace and fulfillment. Liberating yourself from these external demands is hard, but that’s the price of true freedom. It’s breaking free with the ‘breaking’ part on the front end.
Even if it’s not a permanent fix, the occasional relief of expectations will help you bounce back into simply Being.
You don’t want to only be after the results of what you do.
You want to instead be free to enjoy the path you’re taking with all the many twists & turns along the way. Your ideal path is one where you will never reach the end (for the result), but you will have an adventurous, soul-filled time as you move through it. Results will come & go, but it’s the life that happens between it where you want more meaning created.
A results-only approach leaves you feeling shallow and likely not even accomplished, while the path of enjoyment makes for a deeper experience and genuine smiles.
The seeking mind has its own limiting factors too.
There’s a delicate dance between hunting down novelty and appreciating familiarity. It’s not a black or white matter, but a mix of both - your own unique balancing act. If you’re a novelty connoisseur you eventually need to make time to enjoy the fruits of your lifestyle and stabilize into a sense of peace.
Chasing the new & shiny is core to our human nature, but left unchecked it will steer you away from a fulfilling life.
It’s not easy to stay focused and keep your eyes on the prize.
Kevin Kelly, writer & techno-optimist, puts his brilliant solution bluntly when he says, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”. As soon as we let awareness start to fade away, the definition of ‘main thing’ seems to devolve without our conscious influence. But, if we can routinely insert our awareness throughout the day, then we can move the needle (even if only slightly) for that thing we care about the most.
You do that enough and your priorities will be straight. They will be serving you versus the other way around.
There’s an art to surrendering.
It goes against our nature to surrender because we usually want to retain control at all costs. Yet having all the control with our egos usually doesn’t work out too well. The ego has its purpose and need not be destroyed, just dampened and put in its proper place.
It does not belong at the top of your inner hierarchy. What sits there needs to be more objective, omnipresent, and above all else: God.
The chances of you knowing what’s best for you are pretty slim.
Not because you’re not smart and knowledgable about your own life, but because there’s so much going on in this world that it’s impossible to figure out on your own. So it makes sense to have a bit of help with how the future shall unfold and place more of the control into God’s hands. You can only get you so far.
A higher power’s influence and wisdom ought to be welcomed and thanked.
What do you have to lose by giving up control?
Are things going so fantastically great that you don’t dare risk veering off? If you’re like me, you want a life that’s better than you can possibly imagine. And for that, you’re going to need an imagination better than yours, so you might as well run the experiment.
I encourage you to put this to the test. See for yourself how great things can be when you loosen up a bit and hand over the future to the Divine.
Give it some time to play out and if you don’t see better results, you can always pop back into your tried & true ways.
Inner calm and clarity…you and I both want it.
And it all starts with how you express, process, and integrate complex feelings. If you’re able to do this in a meaningful way, you’ll be able to free yourself from the burden of those unresolved feelings. The fewer of these you have in the way, the more attuned your nervous system & perception of reality.
This all leads to a more authentic and fulfilling life where your emotions are fully expressed & felt as they become apart of you.
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, knew that the mind and body were intimately connected.
In his clinical and personal experience, he noticed that strong emotions tend to have an image associated, yet a lot of these images aren’t easily accessible due to being hidden from our awareness in the unconscious.
Emotions are fluffy, blurry, and typically hard to describe, but images are much more manageable & interactive. By bringing these images up into our wakeful consciousness with self-healing practices like Active Imagination, we can have the opportunity to work with them & through them.
It beats having all of these charged images floating around deep within you causing more ruckus than redemption.
This is true lightness on your feet.
Where the weight you were carrying around for so long is dealt with and alchemized. You’re no longer backed up with burden. You’re no longer consumed with guilt, shame, or the rest of the gang. Instead, you make way for grace and goodness to fill you up. Freedom isn’t free. It’s actually a lot of work and you gotta do it for yourself, no one can do it for you.
Once you have a taste of freedom, you won’t want it any other way.
