Courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to be afraid without being paralyzed.
I have found three ways of thinking that shift me out of a feeling of powerlessness: practicing gratitude, trust in the moment, and thinking about others.
Seeking out people and experiences we would normally avoid provides a fertile place to learn new things about ourselves and about life.
I think more often than not, we do know what to do; the cost of our realness just seems too high at the time.
Balance is like this. Spreading ourselves thin looks impressive, but in the end, we are the first to lose.
Feeling powerless leads to outward aggression in the form of frustration and anger, or withdrawal inward into depression and victimization.
We are captured in a culture where our very identity is tied up with our accomplishments. We wear all we have to do like a badge on our shirt for all to see. In this rush to get to the next thing, we have left no time for ourselves to digest and assimilate our lives; this may be our biggest theft of all. We need time to catch up with ourselves. We need time to chew and ponder and allow the experiences of life to integrate within us. We need time to rest and to reflect and to contemplate.
Living the life that cries to be lived from the depth of our being frees up a lot of energy and vitality. The juices flow. Everyone around us benefits from the aliveness that we feel. On the other hand, suppressing that life, for whatever reason, takes a lot of our life energy just in the managing of the pretending.
When we don’t know what we want or we don’t have the courage to pursue it, everything that everyone else is doing looks tempting to us. We begin to lust after others’ accomplishments and others’ possessions. We get sidetracked from our own dreams and our own realness.
I often hear people say, “I just don’t know what to do.” I think more often than not, we do know what to do; the cost of our realness just seems too high at the time.
Carl Jung understood the fluidity of truth when he made the statement that what is true at one time for us, at some point no longer serves us, and eventually becomes a lie. He understood that truth changes over time;.
When we run from life, try to manage life, or leave our energy scattered here and there, we feel differently than when our whole self shows up with our thoughts, words, and actions congruent and unified. When we are centered in the moment, we can fully meet the ordinariness of life as well as the challenges of life.
We can’t save people, or fix them. All we can do is model, and that points the finger back at us.
Discontentment is the illusion that there can be something else in the moment.