People have written to me lately, and individual clients I work with in person or on skype or facetime or phone, and people in Year of Inquiry, and messages on facebook….
….and they’ve said something I have also felt in my life.
For me, I’ve been working hard, but not efficiently. I love working, I love my life’s projects, but I found my mind began to be filled by “have to”. I have to do this, that, this, that. No stopping.
Burn out.
A fatigue, feeling discouraged. Maybe a sense of failure. Or a feeling of having lost.
Even devastated.
I’m not making it. Some people overeat with overwhelm. Or overspend. Over-plan. Then, unfortunately, even more failure.
It brings enormous suffering into the mind.
I remember not being able to get out of bed, with a physical sense of deep, deep low energy. I remember drinking strong coffee, trying to put something into the body to change the foggy and dreadful feeling of slow movement. I wanted to find an “up” feeling.
Being “up” is better. Right?
But what if you didn’t believe where you are right now, no matter how you feel and what you feel, is wrong….and must be changed?
What if there is nothing that could make you happy outside yourself, including an elevated mood, or a million bucks, or health, or love coming to you from another person?
Strange, I know.
Something here, in the empty, dark, tired space….
….thinks happiness must be somewhere else. Even if you’re too tired to try to find it anymore.
It isn’t here. Nope.
What if we remembered inquiry, in the middle of depression, or feeling like we’re making a mistake, or falling backwards, or failing in some way?
But if even that seems to hard, here’s what to do.
First, take a very deep breath and stop. Even if you’re lying in bed, just stop trying to figure it out.
Right now.
Then, you can wonder….what are my thoughts doing right now?
Oh, it’s churning out stories. Concepts.
Despairing ones. Sad ones. Angry ones.
Thoughts like “I am always like this” or “I’ve failed” or “I need x to be happy”.
But something else is here besides these thoughts, besides “thinking” running amok.
The mind might feel resistance, fighting, feeling oppositional to What Is.
Who would you be, though, without believing these thoughts?
Who would you be without the belief you’re doing it wrong? Without the thought you’ve lost? Without the thought you’re missing it? Without the thought you can’t find happiness?
Can you make a place in the room, in your surroundings, inside of you, for your thoughts….and also notice what else is here?
Can you let this be here, all of your thoughts and images and painful stories, and not fight against them and wish you were different and pray for your mind to stop talking?
Maybe let it run today, in this moment, like a river running through.
Then once you sit still awhile, wondering who you are without your troubled stories, you’ll notice who you are without a past, and without a future.
Without anything wrong with sitting here.
Much love,
Grace