When it comes to goals, desires and dreams, you can take it to the bank that motivation will not be there when you need it most. Willpower will be on a distant walkabout when you require it as an antecedent to taking action to start living the life you really want for yourself.
Having the right thoughts or feelings prior to taking action is not required.
Be grateful when everything lines up perfectly in terms of your thoughts, feelings and actions, but recognize that more often than not, (especially if you demand that it happen), it won’t. That’s life. When we resist being in alignment with how life works, we suffer. When we align ourselves with how life works, we increasingly experience more vitality and engagement and put ourselves on the path today of experiencing the life we really want.
Don’t rely on your state of mind to be right before you do the right things.
If you are feeling stuck, you are simply experiencing a feeling of being stuck, but you yourself are not stuck. You are, after all, able to move about independently of what you are currently thinking or feeling, aren’t you?
What’s that, you say?
Check it out for yourself right now if you don’t believe me! Tell yourself that you cannot move. Really think it with conviction. Go ahead. Be as serious as death. Tell yourself right now that you absolutely cannot move and say it with the commanding voice of authority. Establish a very strong sense about the absolute truth that you cannot move…
Now, start to wiggle your fingers or toes, or cough, or sing Happy Birthday. Go ahead…try it! Even if you don’t try it, make sure that you don’t notice that you have successfully taken the action of refusing to try something out…cool, right? Decisions and actions are happening nonstop all day long!
What can we learn from this little experiment? You are able to take action independently of how you feel! Frankly, we have more control over our present behavior than we do the thoughts and feelings that enter our minds from moment to moment.
If you don’t know your rights, then you don’t have them. -Susan Dwoskin
Each one of us have an individual bill of rights. You have the right to your own opinions. You have the right to be with who you want to be. You have the right to be wrong, and the right to join in any conversation you want to be in and share your thoughts and ideas. You also have the right to leave conversations that hold no interest for you. Did you know that you also have the right to pay no attention to the unhelpful thoughts that arise in your mind throughout the day, also?
You were born with the innate capacity and ability to disregard the negative chattering that is running through your mind. You already have built into you the ability to make room for the emotions and sensations that are flowing through you as your experience right now. As you begin realizing this and putting it into practice, you will discover that you also have the ability to get into action and invite the fussy, negative chattering to come along with you for the ride!
You are never stuck. You may be noticing or experiencing stuck thoughts or stuck feelings right now, but who you are is never stuck. It is not possible for the you who you are to be stuck, (are you starting to get a sense of why this is true?)
It makes me quietly laugh at myself when I catch myself stress-thinking about needing to work on myself or start some kind of improvement plan in the coming weeks, even though I have done it a million times. The internal dialogue goes something like this, “I really need to take care of myself. I need to change my diet and get more exercise. Man, I need to stretch more, or do some yoga, or pray or meditate…”
Laughing is very helpful in this situation. What?! Why is laughing at my difficult circumstances and my pressured plans to remedy those things in the coming weeks helpful?
Because ‘the coming weeks’ are not here yet, and there is no way I can take action in a time that is not here yet. Would you agree? How much control do I have over a time that is not here yet? Choices are: 1) Total control or 2). No control.
Only right now is here. Only right now am I able to do some kind of action or behavior that is in alignment with what really matters to me in this life. And if I don’t use this now, today, then what makes me think I could access a superpower that would enable me to take action during a time that isn’t even here yet?!
The stories we tell ourselves about life are not reality, but they sure seem like it if we are not aware that they are only stories. Stories are composed of the thinnest of gossamer we call ‘thoughts’.
These habitual thoughts have poured into our minds more mornings than we have been pouring coffee into our cups. The sun rises, we awaken, and instantly, the flow of thoughts begins. No one in the history of humanity has ever found the off-switch to the thought machine that gears up each morning and that runs nonstop throughout the day and into the night, even in our dreams, the thought machine is plugging away!
Trying to control our thoughts is a hopeless activity…it can’t be done.
You don’t need to get rid of the negative thoughts that show up, but rather it is helpful to see them for exactly what they are…thoughts and nothing more. Freedom is found in getting better at noticing them, seeing them as passing story, and then in this very present moment turning toward what really matters to you during this brief time you have on the planet.
If we have been taking shoddy stories about ourselves seriously up until now, so be it. I’m not going to recommend wrestling or fighting with something that is not worthy of your time and attention. The only thing any of us have to do about a shoddy story is absolutely nothing! If we just just leave our thinking alone, and see it for what it is, a shoddy story, we will find out through our own experience that the story moves on.
If you don’t feed it, it withers and slithers away.
It is estimated that we have some 70,000 thoughts a day. It is the nature of thoughts to be constantly arriving and departing, unless we grab a hold of them and keep them in place by arguing with them, or ruminating about why we are having such negative thoughts or exhausting ourselves with trying to get rid of them.
The way to get a story to loosen its grip is to loosen your grip on the story.
You’re Not All That…
You are not your story. You are not a narrative. You are not your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, attitudes or rules. You aren’t your circumstances. You aren’t your reputation, recognition, education, degrees nor awards. You aren’t your financial condition presently, or in the past or in the future. You aren’t the things you own and you’re not defined by what you currently lack. You aren’t your physical body and you’re not the state your body is in right now. You aren’t your looks or your perceived lack of them. You aren’t your traits or your personality, either!
You’re not all that…and this is the best news you could ever hear!
You are alive right now! You are aware! You have this very moment free and clear to use in whatever way you wish!
The pathway to the life you really want begins quite simply, and starts where you are right now: only step back a moment and allow your mind to clear. See if you can loosen your grip on the suspect stories you have been taking so seriously up until this moment. Allow the feverish churning of thoughts, memories, images, and fears all to simply settle down, as best you can. It might happen in this moment, or it might take a little more time. It doesn’t matter. Your mind is designed to self-correct and will do so if given half a chance. Your mind wants to return to peace. It will go there if you leave your thoughts alone. See if this isn’t true for you…
Working on ourselves doesn’t work.
We think that we have to work on ourselves to improve the quality of our experience of life. We painfully reflect on our seemingly deep need to work on our self-esteem. We feel an incessant drive to polish up our persona to secure the praise of others, or hope we won’t be rejected. We try to force ourselves to improve our discipline, and we pressure ourselves to be more mindful, or more compassionate with ourselves or others. We hassle ourselves to no end, and it can feel dispiriting and even downright debilitating at times. We repeat this cycle over and over, day after day, forgetting to stop for a moment, this moment, and simply become curious about what happens when we simply leave all of this inner tension and struggle alone…
Ouch, that hurts!
Imagine this scenario. You are sitting in your kitchen, and you suddenly reach over and grab a nearby cast-iron skillet and start hitting your forehead with it as hard and fast as you can. Ouch! That really hurts! In between skillet strikes, you start wondering if it would hurt less if you slowed down a little bit, or perhaps struck less forcefully. You try this, but it still doesn’t feel very good. It’s hardly an improvement, at all. You desperately look around between skillet strikes to see if you have a smaller pan, and you’re in luck! On top of the stove is a smaller pan, so you grab that one and start hitting your head with the smaller pan, breathing a momentary sigh of relief that you figured out a way to drop the bigger, heavier skillet. But it quickly dawns upon you that you are still experiencing significant pain as the smaller pan repeatedly impacts your head. If you wanted to feel less pain in this scenario, what’s the answer here? Right…the answer is to put the pan down and immediately you start to feel better.
When we mistakenly accept and demand that we need to work on ourselves, we are saying that we believe some degree of pan-striking is required. Sometimes we fear that a heavy skillet is needed, and at other times a lighter one is likely to do the job. Sometimes, we imagine the pain that the skillet/pan will cause, and we give up, wandering over to the TV, or amble over to the cabinet to pour a drink, or simply lie down in bed, hoping to turn off the world by going to sleep . As we engage in some kind of avoidance behavior, we fail to notice that we just picked up another skillet and have started hitting our head with that as we struggle with negative, critical thoughts about ourselves and feel the descending sense of despair about the very real defects we must have that we are unable to even get started improving ourselves.
Just as putting the pan down is the answer to relief from pain, so is putting down our difficult thoughts. The moment we stop taking our pressured thinking so seriously, we will notice relief. Do not take my word for it. Your own experience is what we are looking for here.
When we feel relief, our innate well-being begins to well up effortlessly. We begin to have more perspective, clarity, insights and thoughts that are likely to be quite quite helpful for the situation at hand. Notice that I said the situation at hand, not ‘for situations that are going to happen a week from now’, (let’s all sing together now: “a week from now isn’t here, so how could I possibly know what to do or realistically take action a week from now, in this present moment?”).
I am not recommending inaction as the key to a better life, far from it. If all we are doing is resisting gravity, the likelihood of a full and rich life is quite low. However, what am I saying is that we can only live our life right now. Life is a moment-to-moment process. Sometimes we have the right thoughts and state of mind to get into action and sometimes we don’t. If we do feel a surge of motivation, then go ahead and ride the wave! Get busy and have a blast doing it. If not, we learn to recognize that lower quality thoughts and feelings are temporary and have no power to stop us from taking action, even when they insist they do.
If you have realized that there is something you want to do that is important to you, waiting on something like motivation is a making a decision to to continue feeling stuck. Motivation is not required to take action…taking action is available right now, and only right now, independent of what you are thinking or feeling. Again, test it out for yourself, or this will simply sound like something you might read in a nicely decorated greeting card.
If your mind is full of difficult and dispiriting thoughts, beliefs or images right now, there is nothing to do about them, literally. Doing nothing in this domain, in the psychological domain, is the best thing you could do. The thoughts and feelings will move on, to be replaced by more thoughts and feelings. It is the human condition that we all have thoughts and feelings that arise and move on all day long. When we see that, we can also start to see that we are not obligated to take any of those thoughts or feelings seriously.
You are not your thoughts and neither are you your feelings in any given moment. Sometimes you will feel great, and other times you won’t. However, in any given moment, you have the capacity and ability to take some kind of action in support of what really matters to you.
Today, you can prove this to yourself. You may forget tomorrow, but once you have an understanding that you have the ability to think, and you have the product of that thinking ability that we call ‘thoughts’, you will realize that not every thought or feeling merits your attention, and that realization will be with you as long as you live.
Being grounded in this present moment, having clarity about what matters and taking action whether you feel like it or not are ultimately the keys to a richer and fuller experience of life.
Do not wait. Begin now and prove it to yourself.
