The other thing is way more difficult.
Whatever is keeping you from living
The life of your dreams
And fulfillment of your potential
Isn’t practical in nature.
Or to put it another way,
Isn’t because it’s difficult in and of itself.
The reason I know this
Is because I’ve spent many years
Not living up to my potential,
And I can tell you with something like certainty,
That not doing what you know you should be doing
Is way more difficult, grueling, taxing, and depressing
Than just doing it.
Which actually ends up being a party in comparison.
Lately, I have been doing the things that were hanging over my head to do,
Which I previously wasn’t doing.
Unable to scale the walls of resistance which had been built up for years, if not decades.
And from the vantage point of finally scaling those walls of resistance,
And finding myself in the pattern of behavior that facilitates
Life expansion,
Dream acquisition,
Purpose-driven, motivated behavior on the daily,
And a pattern of doing the (so-called) difficult things I was previously unable to handle,
What I can say about it from the vantage point of doing it,
Rather than not doing it,
Is this…
There is nothing difficult about doing it at all.
In fact,
It’s way, way, way easier than not doing it.
That said,
In order to be the person who would get to this point,
To shift into the being who would make a statement like that, was in fact quite difficult.
But what was difficult about it
Isn’t the changing lifestyle,
Or the brass tacks and work of dream building,
But the inner work,
Of being a person who is on his own side enough,
Who likes or loves himself enough,
Who has dealt with inner shame and anger enough,
To actually do,
Not even what needs to be done,
As much as what you really want to do.
Because doing what you know you should be doing
Isn’t really grueling at all.
It’s energizing and celebratory.
It’s flow state acquisition on the daily.
It means being charged with purpose
And co-creating with God.
It means being inspired and inspiring.
As opposed to
Self-condemning,
Bored,
Depressed,
Procrastinating,
Distracted and looking for escape,
Full of shame and guilt.
Of those two,
Which sounds more difficult?
Clearly, not doing what needs to be done is way more difficult.
So why do most people not do what needs to be done?
Why do most people live in the space just outside of actively working on a dream?
If the nuts and bolts of it aren’t the problem,
What then is the problem?
In my case, it was an inability to forgive
Myself and others,
As well as an inability to repent for past mistakes,
Combined with an inability to observe my own mind’s inner workings or thoughts,
And separate my identity from all of those things.
We know all the things we are supposed to do already.
It’s a basic list which also isn’t that difficult for a being that has overcome their demons.
It goes something like this….
Wake up early,
Pray/meditate/seek the father,
Get to work with that early morning energy,
Don’t scroll social media but rather focus for a good few hours,
Exercise,
Overcome resistance and don’t procrastinate,
Be disciplined and consistent.
Repeat for a few years and no way will your dream life or some version of it not emerge.
We all know this list.
And we all know the fancy subcategories that we could insert into it:
Cold plunge,
Infrared sauna,
Red light therapy,
Fasting,
Yoga,
Journaling.
Etc. And filling the blanks.
Too many to list.
No casual student of the self-help industry doesn’t already know all of those suggestions.
And the other thing is,
Is all those things are actually fun to do.
They aren’t even hard.
What’s hard is liking yourself enough to do them.
What’s difficult is being your own friend enough to do them.
What’s difficult
Is letting go of inner rage that you aren’t even aware is there enough to do them.
What’s brutal is forgiving yourself enough to do them.
If you look at yourself like a car,
Addressing just the behavior attached to working on a dream,
The morning routine, consistent action, etc.,
Is like looking at the externals,
The paint job and the details,
When the problem is the engine.
Opening the hood and looking at the engine
Is dealing with the underlying condition of the vehicle of your life.
The problem isn’t that you’re lazy,
The problem is that you’re angry.
The problem isn’t that you can’t focus,
The problem is that you are full of toxic shame.
The problem isn’t that you are addicted,
The problem is you are full of fear.
Being lazy, unable to focus, and addicted
Are the symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself.
(Well they can also become a problem but they aren’t the origin in and of themselves)
Too much self-help material only addresses the symptoms and tells people to stop doing the symptoms,
Even though the symptoms are doing them.
It’s like, “Gee, thanks, tell me something I don’t know.”
The torture of repeating behavior you know is self-defeating and self-destructive is profound,
And made all the worse by being keenly aware that you would rather not be doing it.
And yet, it’s as if you are a puppet connected to strings of shame,
Under the devil’s control entirely.
So, how do we clip the strings of shame?
The puppet strings of shame?
Let’s open the hood and look at the engine.
2
Turns out it’s a four-cylinder engine,
And those cylinders are:
- Forgiveness.
- Repentance.
- Observation.
- Action.
Start with forgiveness.
No doubt you have lingering resentments,
Because if you didn’t, you would be naturally living a life that wasn’t held back from righteous action.
It’s a very simple equation:
Lingering resentments keep us stuck in patterns of self-betrayal and boredom.
And design feature of humanity’s makeup,
Rather than a flaw,
Because it’s trying to wake you up to forgive and let those resentments go.
Your soul is torturing you on purpose,
So you wake up and recognize that you have some forgiving to do.
“For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.”
Matthew 6:14
He ain’t gonna let you off the hook walking around with resentment.
No matter how “right” you think you are
There laws of nature and spiritual laws that are bigger than any of us.
One of them is…. You won’t be forgiven until you forgive. And whether you know it or not… you best believe… you need to be forgiven.
“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”
Colossians 3:13
And this goes for forgiving yourself as well,
Because I’m pretty sure no one has betrayed you worse than you have betrayed yourself.
We must cultivate forgiveness.
Forgiveness itself is a spirit.
We don’t necessarily wield forgiveness or control where it goes or how complete it is,
But rather we live in its atmosphere and cultivate it,
Pray for it,
Seek it on the daily,
Understand its importance to freeing us from the cages of our own inner turmoil.
And whenever the spirit of resentment comes into us,
We deal with it head-on.
We actively think of the source of that resentment in a loving light.
We humble ourselves into the understanding that we too have sinned, if not towards that person specifically (which we probably have on some level),
Then we certainly have against others and need to be forgiven ourselves.
We apply the Ho’oponopono mantra of forgiveness.
We pray for forgiveness.
We resonate in forgiveness.
And we forgive everyone in our lives,
Our families, our friends. Every single person.
And we actively stay vigilant against any lingering or new resentments that rise up.
Forgiveness becomes like oxygen for the lungs of our dreams.
Next, we repent.
We clear the cache of our sinful nature.
We clobber the toxic shame.
We let go of the anger and the guilt towards ourselves.
Repentance sounds all religious,
But really, it’s a form of self-forgiveness,
And self-acceptance,
And a major aspect of getting unstuck and arriving at the mountaintop of flow state.
Our sins or our mistakes hold no real power but the power we give them from failure to acknowledge them and ask to be forgiven from within.
If you are a believer, then to ask God to forgive you (spoiler alert, He will and probably has).
And if you aren’t a believer,
Then at least forgive yourself.
Seeking to repent is very easy for one who is rooted in spirit.
Again, it’s a kind of atmosphere one who is rooted in spirit naturally lives in.
But this is much more difficult for those who are rooted in ego.
Ego is what we are overcoming here anyway.
Ego is who is holding us back and keeping us in dysfunctional patterns.
The resistance towards forgiveness and repentance is coming from the ego,
Who knows that these actions will weaken its stranglehold on our beings.
But trust me when I say you want that stranglehold weakened.
After that, we practice
observation,
Or meditation,
Or metacognition.
(They amount to the same thing)
Essentially, observing your own mind
And the content of your thoughts,
Rather than being led by them,
Or believing them to be who you are.
You simply make a home out of practicing presence,
And so become rooted in the now moment,
More and more.
A mind lost in resentment and toxic shame,
That believes all the content of its own mind
And identifies with that toxic landscape,
Has little chance to live productively,
And perhaps can continue doing tasks that always got him or her by.
But any attempts to evolve and expand (beyond those)
Will be thwarted and futile,
Doing so from the space of an unconscious mind that hates itself and can’t even see how much anger it’s running from.
If you wonder why you fail to do the basic things you know you need to do to fulfill your dream,
This is why.
And so, lastly comes
the action.
This step will be a natural outgrowth of these other steps.
But one thing to keep in mind is right action takes time to build,
And so being patient with yourself when making these shifts is necessary.
Don’t expect to forgive everyone,
Repent,
And observe your mind for a couple of hours,
And suddenly work like a well-oiled race car
In the upper echelons of productivity.
Urgency is good,
But not too much urgency.
Understand it’s a process to go from completely broken down on the side of the road,
To winning the Indy 500.
Applaud the progress you make and strap in for growing pains,
On your way to the limitless city known as flow.
Once you’re in that state with momentum building
And no more torturous voices condemning you for holding back
You’ll see how much easier it is
To let go and flow
and rather than hold on and know.
