Freedom Friday: Free To Be Authentically You!
In Wednesday’s post on the Sermon on the Plain from the Gospel of Luke, we touched on what it means to be spiritual you, your True Self. We talked about letting go of the Ego, emptying ourselves of Ego so that there could be more of the real spiritual you, and about expressing our True Self through compassion and empathy. After Wednesday’s 3,000 word blog post, you may be sitting out there thinking “all of this sounds incredibly painful, and incredibly hard”, but today is Freedom Friday, so let’s break this down and make it a little easier, shall we?
No one gets to define you but YOU! Other people’s definitions of us are almost always based purely on assumptions. These assumptions are based on things like our job title, our tax bracket, our appearance, and our mundane interests, and they put us into neat little boxes based on half-truths and miss-truths that actually have absolutely nothing to do with who we really are. Letting other people define you effectively pigeon-holes you, and the keyword there is hole: when we pigeon-hole ourselves, we label ourselves, and let others do likewise; we start to base our lives on assumptions, and start to care about what others assume about us, and guess what? We fall into a great big hole! And once you fall into it, it’s hard as hell to climb out of it, let me assure you!
Picture in your mind a see-saw (aka teeter-totter). A see-saw is basically a straight line (a platform) pivoted over something at its center so that when one end goes up, the other end goes down. What happens if you put someone on one end, and not on the other? Only that end goes down, right? Now, what happens if you put someone on both ends? Either there’s a balance, and the board (platform) stays straight over the center, or if one person pushes, their end goes up, while the other person’s end goes down. And if you put someone heavier on one end than the other, the lighter end goes up, right? What happens if you put something in the center of a see-saw? For one, brief, shining moment, the seesaw stays balanced, just as it does with the same pressure at both ends, and then it will go down on whichever side has the most weight—whichever side you’re leaning towards. Finding the center in life, and living from it works precisely the same way. In everybody’s life, they start at the center of the seesaw; it’s what happens in your life at any given moment that determines which direction you lean, and when you do lean, one side goes up, and the other side inevitably comes crashing down. The only person who should be the center of your universe is you. That does not mean what you might think it means. What it’s actually saying is that you should plop your hind end firmly in the middle of the seesaw and stay there, no matter who gets on or who gets off the two ends; don’t let anybody else sit in the middle of your seesaw and decide which way to lean unless they’ve already shown you they aren’t going to hurt your butt when the end comes down!
There was a time in your life when you were actually happy. It doesn’t matter what bad things have happened to you in your life; what abuses you may have suffered—there was a time in your life when you were actually happy. You might have been three, or you might have been fourteen or you may have been thirty, but there is a point in your life that you can go back to where you were truly happy in your own skin. (Note what I did there: “in your own skin”. You were happy as a luminous being, and you accepted that, even within that shell you’re trapped in right now.) And then something or someone happened that changed that. (It may have even been a series of somethings and someones.) What or who was it? That was your initial breaking point. It took you out of your flow, and now, here you are (and if not, lucky you!). These breaking points happen precisely because we are not living in our flow, which is why they serve as signposts to get back into it.
Know the Flow Recipe:
*A dash of Gratitude
*3 cups of Simplicity
*3 cups of Play
*Infinite amounts of Possibilities
Mix liberally with a wish to be Pleasant. This wish may come in several different flavors: a willingness and eagerness to be kind to others; a need to smile, etc.
Cultivate Gratitude. Ultimately, you control whether you’re going to be grateful for things or not, in exactly the same way that you can control whether a plant lives or dies. You can either cultivate gratitude—choose to take care of it and foster it—or you can kill it by continuing to ignore it. We can cultivate gratitude by choosing to see the good within whatever bad situations are going on in our life. Count your blessings, instead of your hardships. Develop an attitude of gratitude.
Cultivate Simplicity. When we are at breaking point the simple things in our life become grating: they can hone our nerves down to tiny little spikes that cut and chafe, leading us to lash out at not only those things, but the people around us. Why? Because when we reach breaking point, as already discussed, we are at the point in our lives where we are being invited to remember and return to our flow. We can either decide at this point to actually do that, or we can continue to let those things rake across our mental and emotional skins. Those things grate on you precisely because they are such simple things; simple things that serve as constant reminders of your lack of time. When we dive into the simple, time can’t be a pressure anymore. Instead, time becomes a gift. When you do not pause to appreciate the simple things, not only will you suffer, so will whatever you’re doing that’s eating up all your time and driving you to breaking point in the first place! You need to pause a moment and ask yourself what that simple thing that is presently grating on your nerves right now would have meant to you at a time when you were happy. It’s not about the time stretched out all around you and pressing you down to your knees—it’s about the moments in between!
Remember how to play. Playing is something that many adults insist they have outgrown, and that most teenagers will tell you is stupid, and yet those same adults and teenagers will, if given the chance, go to a baseball, basketball, or football game in order to watch other people get paid to play, or will sit in front of a video game for hours, or will engage in horseplay with their friends at a pool party or gathering. You are never too old to play! The way we play just changes with age. When you are faced with something stressful—any job or activity—you can always turn it into a game, simply by turning it into a personal challenge that you need to win. You must allow yourself time to play—whether that means turning your present job into a game, or actually taking the time to play in whatever way fills you with joy. Whatever takes you to that place where you start to treasure time instead of feeling pressured by it, you need to start doing it now, because when we begin to play, that’s when we start to open ourselves up to infinite possibilities.
Believe that anything can happen–and it actually might! When we close ourselves off to either extreme—success or failure—we remove for ourselves any hope of a spirit of accomplishment. To go through life without the possibility of that—no wonder you’re at breaking point! We must return to that childlike state of belief, when we were three years old, and fearless. The biggest difference between you and that three-year-old is that the three-year-old doesn’t realize they are opening themselves up to the infinite possibilities; they just do it. Whatever is breaking you down to the lowest common denominator right now, how would you have looked at that same thing when you were three? Whatever you are presently facing in your life, apply “three-year-old you” to it, and see what sorts of possibilities suddenly pop up!
Mix liberally with a wish to be Pleasant. Best-selling books have been written and actual religions have been founded surrounding the law of attraction—what you put out into the Universe comes back to you three-fold; like attracts like. It sounds ridiculous and stupid to many people. It might even sound a little lala and granola, but hear me out here. If you go through life with a puss on your face, throwing attitude at everybody you meet, what happens? People do the same right back to you, don’t they? You create even more stress for yourself in the long run. But what happens if you go through life like three-year-old you, smiling at people and offering a laugh or a joke or a hug? Even if some folks rebuff you for having done this, don’t you feel better? At any rate, you’re bound to create a lot more joy than fights. In the end, the law of attraction, as lofty as some might make it sound, really is just that simple. This wish to be pleasant–this wish to spread more positivity in the world than negativity–will eliminate more stress than you create, and help you recover the flow of being authentically you. It will also actively spread compassion, and we all could use a lot more of that attracted into our lives, now, couldn’t we?
*Look for my upcoming e-book, Start At Zero, hopefully available before the holiday rush!
