If I squeeze the juice out of my NEW YEAR intentions that are often conditional, I always get the unconditional… Grace, Joy, Fulfillment! If this is available to me unconditionaly, could I still motivate myself into life? How can I live, love, learn and serve from this beaming certainty?
I happen to love time, so unapologetic, so inconsiderate, even sarcastic, I would say. It takes from us, it gives to us, or it just completely ignores us, just like breaths that sustain us, and yet, they come and go, completing and beginning, rising and falling, and in that flow we exist, we build rhythm, meaning and purpose.
The new year allows us the conscious experience of becoming active participants in the eternal moving and flowing. It seems so cruel, and regardless of our opinions, we are forced to allow the future to become the present; and no matter how strong our attachments, it always moves into the past.
NEW YEARS provide a unique opportunity to move on, to recreate our strategy and redefine our goals: remember, feel, heal, examine, forgive, learn, reassess, let go, and move into the true experience of abundance and success. We have a choice, in fact, we only have a choice…
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space there is the power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” ~Viktor Frankl
Our opportunity is much greater than our story of accomplishments and hardships of the year.
We are not our interpretation of ourselves, but the one that interprets. Only I can define myself and I always maintain responsibility to do so.
Success and failure are a byproduct of my definition of success and failure. I am both the monster and the hero. This interpretation keeps me hostage in my own story. Yes, yes, there is clear evidence of “Reality”: wellbeing, health, wealth, power, life, death, things… situations that are palpable, measurable, and often more painful than pleasurable. We have been focusing outside way too long. It has proven to be futile and totally unsustainable nowadays. Let’s spice it up with a twist on strategy and begin our epic quests within ourselves.
My life began the day I realized that there is no one coming to validate me, save me, love me. After many, many, many tears, I woke up to my life, which I actually find wonderful!
Ever since I stopped sitting in the bleachers, I am in the GAME! I don’t have to wait. I can rise and step into the awareness of this flow of unconditional love and acceptance NOW.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ― Albert Einstein
If we were to apply the scientific method to our human experience, each of us could surrender the story and begin a curious adventure towards sustainability, human sustainability.
“Socrates told us, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’ I think he’s calling for curiosity, more than knowledge. In every human society at all times and at all levels, the curious are at the leading edge.” ― Roger Ebert
The last days of the year provide us with the almost inescapable responsibility of revisiting our lives or, to be more precise, our interpretation of our lives. Everything in between me and my acceptance of the “ISness” of reality is material for my ongoing experiment. This keeps being my greatest intention and service.
Gift this year to YOU! I am aware this is rather difficult to accept, so I propose to reframe certain concepts. First reframe: Self-Awareness has absolutely nothing to do with selfishness. In fact, let’s call them the higher self — the one with purpose and integrity — and the lower self — the one conditioned by immediate gratification and preferences of the form — . Second reframe: Responsibility, yes, we are 100% responsible for the experience of our reality, yet, this is not a load. Our beingness thrives and propels into magnificence through our individual abilities to respond to life.
WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LIFE WE LIVE, so if you absolutely love your life, GREAT! Keep doing what you have been doing. But if you, like myself and the majority of us, would like something to be different in any possible way, THIS IS OUR YEAR to be RAW and to #maketheworldhumanagain
Stress is a contraction, a contradiction stimulated by a chain of reactions and outdated patterns. We perceive reality and assimilate it through our own filters. One of the principles of the spiritual psychology of doctors Ron and Mary Hulnick tells us that the way we relate to the issue, is the issue.
Researcher Nassim Nicholas Taleb asks: “What if we could reframe stress?” Become ANTIFRAGILE: those elements that gain from chaos and become stronger. The proposal seems complicated, but it only requires the opening of awareness and purposeful will.
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” ― William Shakespeare , Hamlet
My experience has helped me understand that stress derives from the idolatry we have of heroic or inspiring concepts about ourselves, about the missions we face in relation to the expectations that have been imposed upon us. We dedicate ourselves to compulsively touch up these ideas in our minds, but always keeping them at a distance, in a place faraway. And we give a masochistic sense of motivation to that distance. The distance between the acceptance of what is and the idea of what in our judgment should be, creates a toxic environment for human consciousness. The more we struggle, the more we become frustrated, feelings like guilt and shame unfold easily in this toxicity.
Using the analogy of a movie, people and situations go under a very selective process of casting to make it into our own. Our individual perception is formed by all records we have been holding in our consciousness. Then, with the information we gathered, we create our masterpiece, just like a Clint Eastwood movie, written, produced, directed, acted and edited by us. We play the movie, we fast forward, pause and rewind on scenes
that we like or dislike, etc. This explains the different perspectives, behaviors or ideals we have, under same circumstances.
Our belief system is organized, it selects and sets priorities based on the game that consists of much more than satisfying tastes or preferences, either individual or from the collective that we are a part of, such as family, work environment, academic, religious, political and social, in all their facets.
What we call the world, our daily and social context, our values and hierarchies, all of that belongs to the form. However, it is not only that. In reality, everything we think is form. What we feel is form. What we do is form. Everything we measure as good or bad is form, and is subject to a value judgment based on survival, on contexts, and on pre-established frames of reference. And in some cases, it is based on one’s preference as to what represents the sustainability of different elements that are impossible to adopt in practical combinations.
My personal antidote: the certainty of self, a state that generates an identity and a way of life. In that certainty of self we feel peace in which we know ourselves to be in perfect wellbeing, sheltered in spite of the challenges that will arise in the future, as well as those that have happened to us in the past.
The essential unconditionality by means of the human condition, from where it is possible to breathe without urgency, in the certainty of life, of the experience, of harmony and peace. That is what keeps us in the rhythm and in the state of abundance. This tuning is similar to listening to the radio: the frequency is there, we just have to find it and align ourselves with it.
This year I invite you to consider an experiment: What if life is favoring you? What if you are here on earth to learn? What if you are certain of yourself? From this space, how would you determine your purpose, your direction, your internal tuner, your GPS? How would you move in relation to everything you traverse? How would this alter your perception? How would this alter your final interpretation of reality?
We humans are meant to thrive. Our sustainability is not only basic survival. We humans are magnificent creatures with beautiful complexity. We are ever evolving creatures with infinite capabilities. All of us, not just a handful of fortunate ones, but all of us. This is what makes us both extraordinary and ordinary at the same time.
The skills that will help us turn stress and other toxic stimulants into energy for prosperity and human sustainability are what I have encompassed in the RAW concept: Responsibility, Awareness, Willingness.
If we choose to synthesize and assimilate the challenges of life as possibilities to evolve, complete, learn and participate, we gain the strength to process and restructure our stressors. Thus, by developing skills to respond to everyday challenges, we have the space to choose where we want to direct the external energy we assimilate, what we want to transform, how we are going to synthesize it, just like plants do, converting inorganic elements into energy that allows life beyond any other creation.
The certainty of self is a state in which we know and recognize ourselves in total integrity, ignited by our purpose as opposed to limited by the drive of the human condition.
Purpose has character and the highest form of integrity, the one that makes us one, not the loyalty to rules and forms but rather as the “re-membering” of the parts, so absolute that it does not need to be tested or proven. The energy is dynamic and set to synthesize virtue and share it.
Living in the certainty of self is not a fashion, it does not have a definite aesthetic. It is not praying, meditating, nor wearing white clothes or doing yoga. It is not being vegetarian. There are no forms that are, and forms that are not. It is not predictable, it is not controllable. It is what it is. Perfection does not evoke absolute purity for it is a concept defined by external contexts and frameworks of reference that, although born of virtue, do not always actualize. Since definitions create law, and law is what measures the human form, they use punishment to maintain validity.
Only the self, the bonding with it and loyalty to it, keep us in constant actualization, which is neither conditional nor dependent on preference. Form can change, but the self is maintained through different containers.
The social fabric of our collectives should always be of the unconditional, highest self’s nature: Responsible, Aware and Willing individuals, actualizing dynamically to the common purpose of human sustainability.
Originally published at medium.com