The mind can be so tricky, slippery, sneaky! That rascal!
I thought this today as I remembered Cheri Huber’s quote “you cannot be non-violent if there is any part of yourself that you are in opposition to”.
Then the thought comes in “oh boy, I have a bit of work to do still, I notice I am not perfectly THERE all the time, all self-accepting and non-oppositional”.
This sneaky little thought is actually an opposition in itself. I need to change, to adjust, to fix something. I need to be just a wee wee bit more purely non-oppositional.
How very, very strange it is for the human mind to consider having nothing to do, nothing to fix, nothing to change, nothing to say, no new way to be.
I can hear the thoughts getting nervous right now, like a hen house at night when there’s a fox creeping around. What would become of us! We’d all go to hell in a hand basket! Life would be meaningless! Nothing to do? Nothing to fix? No! Impossible!!! Cluck Cluck Cluck!!
- If I stop trying to improve my business, I’ll sit around all day watching Puppetiji on youtube
- If I let go of protecting myself or I don’t set good boundaries, I’ll get hurt
- If I really don’t think I need to do anything, I’ll be worthless this lifetime
- If I let go of all control, I won’t have a schedule to follow
- If I don’t oppose my fat butt, then I’ll never exercise
- If I don’t oppose the dandelions in my yard, I won’t pull them up
- If I don’t feel like going to work (that boring job) then I’ll lie on the couch all day and eventually, I’ll starve to death (which is bad)
- If I don’t oppose those wealthy people, they’ll take over even more and I’ll never get what I want
This effort to control things, to control yourself, takes a lot of energy. And it believes underneath it all that you can make a mistake, other people can make mistakes, and very bad things can happen unless you get a handle on yourself!!
Cheri Huber writes “Pay attention. Self-hate is slippery. It will even say things to you like, ‘you shouldn’t believe the voices of self-hate. If you are still believing them, there really IS something wrong with you!”
We believe that if we exert enough control and stay “good” people then we’ll have a good life. If we have a bad life, then we must be doing something wrong.
What if we really let go of control…even in our thinking, and found that life moves and ebbs and flows and creates without our personal control or lack of it.
What if we opposed nothing and let go?
Katie says, if you put your hand into a fire, do you have to decide to move it? No. When your hand starts to burn, it moves.
Maybe we don’t have to dictate to ourselves how we’re going to behave today, what we’re going to say or do, or plan. We will sense easily how to be, and our nature is very loving. It doesn’t want to get burned.
What if it’s possible that what lies beneath your opposition is a life force stronger than you could imagine? What if you won’t lie there like a log if you let go of all control and planning?
Katie writes in Loving What Is “people new to the Work often say to me, ‘but it would be disempowering to stop my argument with reality. If I simple accept reality, I’ll become passive. I may even lose the desire to act’. I answer them with a question: Can you really know that that’s true?
Much Love, Grace