55 - Unfurl into freedom
What makes you miserable, perhaps more than anything else, is your belief that you are powerless to change what you don’t want in your life. It is not the experience itself, but the fact that you feel deprived of choice.
If, as a prisoner, you are woken up in the morning and thrown into a sea of freezing water until your skin is numb, you will consider it cruel and unusual punishment. You will suffer.
If you are forced to march miles in the cold mud, barefoot, you will suffer.
Deliberately choose to experience these very same things, and they will produce entirely different effects.
Plunge into the English Channel in the depth of winter because you know it invigorates your body and mind. Relish the cold with fierceness as life pulses powerfully through your veins.
Toss your shoes and walk the cold earth. Feel the grass, the mud, the rocks, and remember that your body is of the same primordial substance.
You have forgotten, but your body knows. It can do such things. It chemically reacts to your fear. It reacts to your resolve. It is the instrument of your consciousness.
If you find it deranged to willfully seek such experiences, look then at your own life. Are there experiences you feel trapped into?
Therein lies your misery. You are a victim in disguise.
Re-frame the experience and regain your power.
Take ownership for what is happening to you, and set yourself free.
You say: “I have no choice but to continue this line of work, because….”
Re-frame the experience and regain your power: “I will find the work that is best for me, and take steps towards that. For now, I will take hold of all this present experience has to teach me.”
You say: “I have no other choice but to remain in this destructive relationship, because….”
Re-frame the experience and regain your power: “I will leave this relationship when the time is ripe. For now, I will take hold of what the present experience has to teach me."
You say: “I can’t help but feeling anger and resentment about how that person treated me.”
Re-frame the experience and regain your power: “I have expressed my anger, and acknowledge my participation in all that happens to me. Now, I will be attentive to never again bring the same experience into my life. I am grateful for what this has taught me, and grateful for the new life I am now creating.”
Now you are free...free to fly.
Consider the shocking possibility that you have not come into this life to pursue happiness.
You did it for the experience of your making. You are headed towards an astonishing discovery that will make your fickle hopes for happiness pale into insignificance. You are like the dragonfly larva (a nymph) going about your underwater existence completely unaware of the mutation coded within you. During your larva lifecycle you will undergo multiple moults, but then one day, for no apparent reason, you will crawl out of the water into the air and the sunlight. A new, entirely unexpected form will unfurl. The water from your larva body will be pumped into long, graceful wings. Your emotionally-saturated existence will be transmuted.
Now a metaphorical dragonfly, you have liberated yourself and birthed yourself into the lightness of being.
