Are you striving, pushing, trying to work things out, trying to work on yourself and feeling exhausted and confused? Is it possible that there is a softer, wiser way that you can turn into, melt into and be guided by?
Flourishing is what happens when we stop trying . . .
It sounds counter-intuitive to say this, but it’s a profound spiritual truth.
Unfortunately, most of us have been told the exact opposite for most of our lives: we have been informed that life is a struggle, that life is unpredictable, that other people are strange and, apart from a few good ones, largely untrustworthy, that we are going to get wounded and lost on this journey of life, and that we are going to have to work on ourselves and work at life if we are to get anywhere.
Does that sound familiar?! This is message that we are getting from all directions. I would even go so far as to say that we receive prolific, systemic and detailed instruction in this everywhere. We have heard this from our parents, our peers, our community, the media, the books we read, the programmes we watch, and so on. And, because we hear this a lot, we believe it. We believe that striving, struggling, trying and figuring it out are all natural, and that this is what we need to be doing to make life work, this is what we need to be doing when we have a problem, and this is the way to respond.
It makes me tired just thinking about it. I think I need to lie down.
Spirit doesn't struggle
In the understanding known as the Three Principles, Sydney Banks describes the first principle of Divine Mind as the intelligence behind all life. We can use other words to describe this that might be more familiar or comfortable to us: Source, God, Spirit, the Infinite. He is referring to that which is within all life and is All Life. There is nothing that is not this.
That includes us. We are Divine Mind. We are the Divine.
And the Divine does not struggle. Or work at being perfect . . . or being acceptable . . . or being whole . . .. Or on knowing how to be. Because how and why would it work on what it already Is? How does that make any sense?
Similarly, the only time that it makes sense for us to work on things is when we are living in the forgetting of Who We Are. This is the only time it can possibly look like the right thing for us to do. When we look at what is happening and see it as wrong, as a problem, as a difficulty or a challenge, we are seeing from the limits of our human self, and not using our Spiritual Seeing.
What is the alternative?
If we are fortunate, we remember this beautiful truth - that trying is not the path of Spirit. It is not the path of Presence. It is simply a human misconstruction.
Whenever we See this, it turns our world around. We come back to our true nature.
We live from our visionary capacity, our ease, our light, our love, our flow.
We do not fill the moment with thinking and analysing and evaluating; we bathe in the moment’s perfection and our own place within this.
We love. We appreciate. We trust. We open. We enjoy.
We unfold with the unfolding of What Is. And we enjoy the colours, sounds, textures and feels of it all. The nuance and the luminosity. The darks and the lights. The sheer splendid sensual feel of it all.
We become the Now, and not our thoughts about it.
Being you comes naturally
You don’t have to work on yourself. Being you is as natural as breathing. It is the very heart of you. It is the essence of you. It is the living depths of your nature - at the cellular level and the spiritual level.
We come into this world as babies, still connected to the Knowing that all is perfect. If we are lucky, this knowing lasts deep into our childhood years. But somewhere along the way, it seems that most of us lose sight of this for a time. We forget that we are perfect, and this world is perfect; we begin to hear and see that we are not. We learn that we need to work on ourselves if we want to be accepted, loved, successful, proficient in life. . .
No other creature in the universe works on themselves or sees themselves as wrong in the way that we do. This is not spiritual reality; this is just a thought that we have learned to believe. And it is not the way the world works.
Everything is Divine Mind. Everything is Spirit. It is all Love. And you are no exception.“Look for how love seeks to show itself to you today. Do not focus on where it is not; look for where it is.”
What works?
What helps when when we feel we don’t work or our life doesn’t work, and we are tempted to start striving, trying, doing and controlling?
What works is shifting to a lighter feeling state. What works is to stop trying to control what we think is happening. What works is to step back and breathe. What works is settling down, trusting and letting something bigger than us take over. What works is letting Divine Mind speak to and through us, because we are Divine Mind.
You don’t have to work on you. You don’t have to work at being you. You don’t have to work on your life. You can sit quietly, in a beautiful place, and feel your own wellbeing, and watch what happens next. As you do so, life unfolds and flows and brings itself to the shores of your being, effortlessly and perfectly. You are impeccably guided and supported. Your dreams are made real.
Like calls to like: you call in the Divine when you rest in the Divine.
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