Life Is An Inside Job
Life has been extraordinarily challenging and disruptive for people around the world this year as wave after wave of tragedy and discord crash onto the shores of human existence. 2020 is clearly a watershed year for humanity.
In this time of seeming chaos, confusion and polarity, I hope to tenderly remind you that our true reality - the one that is always safe, supportive, creative, calm, generous, wise and loving - is on the inside. This is a challenging practice in the face of the daily onslaught of distressing news, but it is nonetheless a constant and universal truth: life is an inside job first.
Consider this.
Take a moment and inventory your body. How does it function for you? How is your overall health and vitality? Isn’t it a reasonable observation that the current condition of your body is, to a large degree, an outward manifestation of your past choices and behaviors? Your body now is a snapshot of your past. Would the same hold true for other areas of your life such as home, relationships, work or recreation? Finally, couldn’t the same be said for the present-moment experience of society, albeit from collective past thoughts, beliefs, inspiration and actions?
Our world is shaped from the inside out.
Yet we live as if it is the other way around. I’ve fallen into this trap over and over and over again through the years: if I just get this or that aspect of my life skillfully sorted out everything will be OK.
Sadly, humanity has been following this script for millennia, conditioning generation after generation to believe the material world is the primary, causal reality while the inner world is the powerless, arbitrary, leftover effect.
In a basic way, this is the meaning when Eastern philosophies suggest that the world is an illusion. The material reality is not the illusion, however. The illusion is believing the material world is the cause of our experience and well-being, not the effect. This can be deeply disempowering, to the point of feeling powerless and trapped by life’s circumstances, where the only way out is the impossible job of perfecting every aspect of our lives.
Some spiritual teachers over the years have referred to the world as a prison. All we need to do is look to the beauty and wisdom of Nature to see this is not true. However, it has been the human condition to find ourselves firmly imprisoned in habitual false paradigms and beliefs passed down through the ages.
Searching for fulfillment outside of ourselves is one of these, a perennially flawed human paradigm that puts the cart squarely before the horse. The Buddha expressed it simply and powerfully when he said life is dukkha, impermanence, and failure to understand the impermanence of life is the cause of suffering.
Where do we find impermanence? In the ever-changing material world around us. Where do we find permanence, that which is ever-present and might promise a stable foundation for living a life fulfilled? In the inner world of human endeavor - thought, inspiration, resilience, creativity, passion, hope and effort that spring forth endlessly from within. Spiritual luminaries of all traditions have been reminding of this for ages.
Life is an inside job first. The outside is important too, but will always be secondary. By changing our perspective to one that honors this flow of life, we begin to set the stage for sourcing our lives from the deep wellspring of life and love within.
We are are truly flowers in the garden of life. Life animates and courses through us unseen. We meet it with the gift of choice - which thoughts, feelings, beliefs and inspirations will we allow to shape our moment and create our world.
We have all the power after all.
What are you focused on? What future are you creating? What is the future you want to create? We will explore this in the next Evolutionary Healing blog titled ‘Dreaming The World Into Being - One Thought At A Time.’