joy

Peace, Joy, Love

For a long time, the question, “What do you want?” would fill me with angst. I never knew what to answer. I always had a sense that if I did, I would be forever limiting myself and excluding something important. In a way, that was true because my perspective itself was limited to things I wanted to be, achieve, do or have.

Sunflower.StuartDavies — Photo by Stuart Davies Used with Permission

Now I realize it never was meant to be a trick question. I just needed a broader perspective.

I’ve been asking myself the “what do you want” question a lot lately. What do I really want? And the answer is so simple, it’s astonishing. I want three things. With these three things, I’m assured a happy life. What are they?

Peace

I want to be peaceful. What does that mean? What does peace look like? Firstly, it requires acceptance of what is. I can’t be fighting against reality and wanting things to be other than how they are. I have to learn to be with what is, no matter what. It doesn’t mean I can’t take action to change something, but I have to let go of expectations and outcomes. Secondly, it means I have to cultivate peacefulness inside myself. I cannot afford to harbor ill-will toward another. If I do, I will lose the thing I most want out of life. I have to be willing to choose peace over being right or justified. I have to choose peace over thoughts that would instead bring me disharmony.

I want joy in my life. To be joyful, I have to appreciate life. Luckily, there’s so much to appreciate: color, fresh air, sunlight, flowers, trees, clouds, rain, animals, art… I also have to allow myself to create and be spontaneous. There’s no room for inhibition in joy. Joy is a natural spring that must be allowed to bubble up and express itself. There’s no room for holding back in fear. Joy is exhuberance. It’s playfulness. It’s willingness. Joy opens itself up to life and says, “Yes!” Joy if full of gratitude and generosity. Joy tries new things and isn’t afraid of being a little silly.

Love

I want to live a loving life. I want to be more loving toward not only others but myself. What does that mean? It means I have to be willing to feel all of my feelings. It means I have to respect others for who they are. It means I have to exercise forgiveness on a daily basis. To be move loving, I have to remove all the barriers I’ve built up to love. It means I have to reexamine my beliefs about love. It means I have to be vulnerable and gentle when I want to protect and defend. Love is compassionate and open. There is room for everyone and everything. Love even has room for fear, but love has the wisdom to know that fear has no real power.

This is all I want out of life. With these three things, I have everything. So, it doesn’t matter how they arrive or what they look like. Whatever manifests, and regardless of what doesn’t, I’d have it all.

Day 22: Realign

An ongoing personal exploration of Divine Guidance and distinguishing between the voice of fear and the voice of love reflecting on the article, How to Distinguish Between Divine Guidance and Fear/Ego/Imagination, on Sir Froggie’s PositiveNews Network .

Today’s pairing is:

Divine Guidance brings you closer to truth, love, healing and your life purpose. It lifts you up and gives you peace or enthusiasm about yourself and the truth, love, healing or life purpose you are working toward.
Ego tries to block you from your truth, love, healing and life purpose. It may try to disguise these blocks as “necessary” or “logical” even though they appear out of the blue and have a fear based feeling to them. Ego drains you, discredits you and makes you feel like “what’s the use?” The closer you get to your goal, the more ego will object!

This is only one pairing, but several things seem to be mashed together. What stands out? For me, it’s the last line: the closer you get to your goal, the more ego will object. I’ve found that to be very true.

It’s quite ironic. My ego is often more invested in my failure than in my success. You think it would be the other way around. You think ego would want to puff itself all up with us getting what we wanted. Instead, it always keeps the goal out of reach. Is it because it fears the end of its usefulness should the goal be met? And why does it try to prevent change? Wouldn’t it feel more useful if it were having to help a person navigate novel experiences and challenges? Who needs a mind when one lives by rote? Yet, ego seems to prefer the familiar…or at least making things so complicated it gets to work overtime to never, ever reach a solution. It’s quite ridiculous and a sign of just how demented the ancient program is. This alone makes me want to cry out, “What’s the use?”

In fact, what’s the use of catering to the ego’s fearful, limiting perspectives? If the damn thing is going to block us from love, truth and purpose, why give it any airtime whatsoever? Why not devote every ounce of energy into freeing ourselves from its insidious tricks and plots? Since I started working with these ideas 22 days ago, egos ways are certainly becoming more and more obvious and transparent.

So I question every feeling of fear. I question everything that feels impossible. I question every voice that says, “never” or “can’t.” I question the completely rational. I realign with all that brings peace, enthusiasm, and excitement. I realign with my gifts and everything I love. I realign with joy. The closer I get to the goal, the more important it becomes to sing louder to drown out the useless noise!

Day 18: Competition vs. Collaboration

Today’s pairing is:

Divine Guidance sees people as divine beings, equals and counterparts, there to learn, grow and teach with you.
Ego sees people as competition, better or worse than you.

I’ve always hated competition. It’s practically the foundation upon which school and our early domestication is built. There are spelling bees, tests, debates, tryouts, and cliques. Everyone is jockeying for position. I could never understand how certain people seemed to thrive on it. It is more in my nature to collaborate, but having no choice in the matter if I wanted to be part of something, I would enter the ring full of anxiety, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but always at the mercy of an authority who told me there was only room for one winner. Winning was often no joy either, as it incurred the wrath of those who used it to abuse themselves for having lost.

This early training reinforced for me the idea that in all things, only competition was possible. There was no such thing as collaboration; that was just a now foggy concept in my head. I think it is one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to the unusual and novel. If there was less competition, after all, then I wouldn’t have to compete. I could avoid all the unpleasantness that competition brings out in people.

Eventually though, things would catch up with me; the novel would become popular. I would feel threatened, jealous and defensive, and mad as hell at myself because somewhere deep down I knew it wasn’t supposed to be like this. The jealousies and defenses of others weren’t all that pleasant an experience for me either! Why were we doing this to ourselves?

Thankfully, an angel helped wake me up, and it changed my life. This angel helped me to understand that I couldn’t manifest a vision I was nursing all by myself and delivered unto me the renewed dream of collaboration.

This began a chain-reaction healing in me. I had, at first, to face all my misplaced faith and the emotions that misplaced faith had been feeding over my lifetime: possessiveness, jealousy, envy, fear, control, and a need for specialness. It wasn’t easy. It was painful, but it was the kind of pain I knew was going to bring me treasure.

I didn’t want to suffer with such feelings anymore. I wanted another option. If nature had room within itself for everything, then why couldn’t I align myself with nature and make room inside myself for both myself and others? How could I alleviate the suffering of others who might have felt in competition with me and include them instead? Maybe I could, and maybe I couldn’t, but I would take steps to try. I wanted to nurture people’s gifts, not feel threatened by them. I wanted to collaborate! Ah!

We all bring something unique to the table. We all have a right and a reason to shine. When we do it together, our light is even brighter. When we need to maintain our specialness, when we need to stand out over and above one another, when we believe that another’s light can eclipse our own, we are asleep to our own magnificence. It not only keeps us from doing greater things, it keeps us from so much joy, possibility, fun, and love. This is truly one of my life’s greatest lessons, one I am eternally grateful to that angel!

Day 16: Joy without Accomplishment

Today’s pairing is:

Divine Guidance wants you to revel in your accomplishments and take joy in your abundance.
Ego tries to make you feel guilty and undeserving.

Ego loves to play along the continuum of self-importance of either making us completely insignificant, guilty and undeserving or, through delusions of grandeur, making us over-confident, arrogant, and entitled. Though there are perhaps “healthier” places along that continuum, we remain subject to the whims of ego given the circumstances of changing situations.

For example, while the voice of love — a “redeemed” aspect of ego (and whether ego can or can’t be redeemed we’ll just set aside for now) — allows us to revel in our accomplishments, it doesn’t free us from the authority of voices. Rather, it reinforces our dependency and again leaves us subject to the changes in the weather. It is still driven by thought and therefore vulnerable to faulty interpretations.

Divine guidance is offering us a much better package. I would go so far as to say Divine guidance just wants us to revel period in joy without accomplishment! To enjoy life regardless of whether or not you’ve done something deemed worth celebrating. Either that or to celebrate every accomplishment…like waking up each morning. When we remember and credit the true power behind such accomplishments rather than entertain a distorted view of our own importance, as long as we remember gratitude, we’re off the continuum and on the “right track.”