Find Your Flow
PART II. (Part I can be found here.)
We often like to think that if something else was different that we would be able to find our way. If we had more money or more time, a less stresful job or home life, fewer expenses or more sources of income that life would be...well, good.
We often like to think that if someone else was different that we would be able to find our way. If our partner was more accepting and supportive of our callings, if our mother or sister or brother could just understand what we were trying to do, if our politicians made different laws that actually made sense, if society supported our endeavors more then surely we'd be able to make it and life would be amazing.
Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else. ~Ivern Ball
In all of this thinking and wishing and wanting and rejecting we lose ourselves. Life flows on whether we are mindfully with it or not.
It is time to acknowledge our responsibility to ourselves and each other.
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. ~Erica Jong
The only person you can change is yourself; the only reality you have the ability to fully embody is your own. Every second, every day that you live chasing another person's dreams and negating your own is another precious day that has slipped away not only for you but for the rest of us to experience the unique, fascinating beauty that is you.
~
We are all rivers flowing into the ocean of being.
The waters of life (those unnameable things that seem to sustain us when life seems impossible, the spirit, the soul, the breath, that sense of hope, even those challenges that are gut-wrenching in the moment) are meant to flow through our lives, into the ocean, into a realm of evaporated spirit, and born again into a flow.
In our efforts to control, we are damming up the waters.
We are blocking and depleting the very essence that we seek to find.
We block our rivers and try to collect the water, saying "mine, mine!"...instead of letting it flow freely and acknowledge this water is part of the whole body of water...not ours.
We let sediment of shoulds and past hurts and current pains and stories build up, slowing or blocking the streaming flow.
We collect heavy thoughts from nearby lands that are not our own and plop them in our waters, hoping our stream will flow like someone elses. All we end up doing is messing up our own flow.
We cannot control how the other waters flow but we can - and have the responsibility to - let our rivers, our lives flow freely and with a gentle strength.
Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life. ~Epictetus
Knowing that our riverbed is uniquely shaped, we do not try to flow like another.Knowing that we still have things muddying up our river, we do not judge the flow of another's water.
Knowing that we are all flowing of the same water, we delight in the discoveries in our own lives and in those of others.
Knowing that we will flow whether we participate or not, we do everything we can, right now to flow as freely and vibrantly as we possibly can.
Whether this means wearing that hat or shirt you thought you could "never wear" but secretly longed to,
quitting the job or finding a way to delight in your daily work,
doing yoga or running or dancing or just squiggling around your living room floor,
journaling quietly and letting your daily life speak for you or finding the highest rooftop and singing our praises,
you have a responsibility to let your life flow.
Namaste.