Now some people say they found God, or that they were saved, or born again, but for me, “I found life again”. And no matter how you say it or what sort of belief system provokes it, I have found through my own kind of crazy (and they have been quite crazy) that you are kidding yourself when you think that it’s a onetime deal. That all you have to do is one day “believe” or feel that feeling and that is it. In my own personal life, I have already proved that to be wrong.
In order to keep living, in order to “keep the faith”, in order to be an incessant part of Creation, it is a constant commitment, a continual trust and something that is not a one shot deal. In my own 28 years of life on this Earth-this time around, I have found that those “moments” are temporary, they get you over a hump, but then afterwards you must follow up, you must keep committing, keep-keeping the faith, you must continue to step onto your mat, especially on the days you would rather not.
I can’t tell you the number of times I “was a changed person” to only go right back to what I was doing prior. Looking back, each one of those experiences was necessary to get me to where I am now, a teaching lesson I wouldn’t otherwise have, but it was not the one “wish” deal I was hoping for.
Life is a continual “action” experience. Now that being said the more in tune you become the easier life gets. But I think what we often forget is that life may not exactly get easier, you just get better at dealing with it, you start to see life differently and you change, and as you change then life starts to shift.
So this last month I found myself a bit personally frustrated with areas of my life and what I was finally able to do with the help of some great people & tools in my life, (which I am grateful to have) was to realize that I need to step out and step up even more, I was at a standstill because life was rolling and I was stopped. And I am pretty sure this happens to us all. Some use the phrase “life happens”, but I don’t think it is quite that way. Sure life happens with or without us, but “our” life is only what we decide to make of it.
So I am humbled at the opportunity to grow out loud, to stumble without hiding, and to admit my strengths and areas of work. And my hope is that all who come to practice at the “Tree” realize that there is no judgment, and the only person we are trying to impress is ourselves and if we are already trying to impress ourselves, we for some reason have already let ourselves down. And that is nothing anyone else can fix. An interesting practice I personally have been working with lately is my ability to “let others grow” and “really be aware that it is ok to make a mistake”.
In my life I have been heavily criticized for all sorts of reasons, some I will never know exactly and it has taken many, many years to understand that all those people are merely teachers for me, that I now thank regularly, and actually welcome (sometimes it’s easier to do than others) what they have to say. Because if they are anything like me, the criticism is usually more about themselves than the person they are saying it to anyway. So in the weeks and months to come, step up and step out, be YOU and welcome what others have to say, now don’t be mean, because remember are you talking with compassion for the other or hatred? But Welcome the opportunities to be a better person, take each instance as life telling you to clean up your act, to refine who you are, what ends up happening is we see these things as threats and instead of growing we burrow down and deflect. So as I work on me I hope that you will work on you. And when I see you on your mat we will help work on each other.