Resistance is inevitable. Growth is optional. Unless you live in your comfort zone, there will be adversity, but the drama we experience is optional.
This is a daily invitation to grant yourself permission to drop all your other nagging ‘Musts’ and ‘Shoulds’ about self-improvement, personal development and living a virtuous life. Just choose this one thing and sit with it today.
Just Be Like This Today: “Today I Choose my Stance”
This is really the question behind so many other questions:
“How much is Enough?”
—Am I enough? Am I being enough? I am doing enough? I am trying enough? Am I growing fast enough? Have I grieved enough? Is my gratitude enough? Is my courage enough?
Life never stops unfolding. Sometimes it feels as though you are waking up into a world that is unravelling, where the centre of everything is collapsing and the two pillars keep pulling themselves and everything apart with them.
What are your two pillars? For some, it is the left and right of politics, who have forgotten they are two wings of the same eagle. For some is the parenting styles in their home or the way they are caught in a war between their own appetites and habits on the one side, and their guilt and wishes for growth and expansion on the other.
Sometimes it is as simple as not knowing where you might find more peace and more meaning in your life, through the effort of becoming, or the yielding to grace of simply being. Too much of the ‘just being’ vibe, and you feel stagnant and aimless. Too much focus on becoming and you feel exhausted and afraid of never being enough, and also never being able to settle into your own authenticity because of forever changing in yourself. Both projects of being and becoming, when practised at the cost of the other, can feel overwhelming. You can be overwhelmed by the rising storms in which you do not know how to ‘be’ or be enough to face what is arriving. You can equally be overwhelmed by the newness of everything leaving you always scrabbling to find your feet in new territory, and your voice when the conversation level keeps changing.
This is what drives your anxieties, and your depression and your sense of shame. And when these get too great, you feel Overwhelmed. When you become overwhelmed, you are moved by your emotions. The word emotion shares a root word with ‘motion’. Your emotions try to move through you. They are a call, to our nervous system, to movement: to either Action or Expression.
The problem is that you say things you don’t mean and you don’t mean the things you say, and then you sometimes don’t actually know how to say what needs said. You simply react. You become reactive, and in this way, you become like a puppet on a string.
The essence of action and expression without acting or expressing outwardly, is Stance.
SO HOW DO WE SOLVE THE UNSOLVABLE PROBLEM?
The only power you really have in the face of the unfolding mystery is Stance. You get to choose how you face what is unfolding, how you meet it, and how you embody the delicate balance between dignity and vulnerability, between surrender and defiance.
Think of your stance like the tail and flap setting of an aeroplane. Whether you are riding the wind currents, caught in turbulence or powered by your own engine, the direction you will travel, and the elevation you cruise at, are determined by your Stance.
The biggest power move that says everything that expression wants to say, without saying a word, and does whatever action means to do without lifting a finger, is Stance.
TAKE HOME/PRACTICE
The take-home today is a simple one, with profound implications:
You cannot choose your circumstances, but you can choose your Stance. And your stance most definitely can affect your future circumstances, and how you see yourself.
The Game Changer idea to inhabit today is that Stance can be seen like steps of a dance, or moves in chess or jiu-jitsu, where a mindset change can create a paradigm shift that changes the board and sets you up for a whole different kind of game.
The most helpful stance or rather a progression of stances is Gratitude, then Playfulness and then radical Self-Permission.
These are the ways of holding the conversation of Life in a way that leads to transcendence—the surest path between overwhelm and mastery that aligns with your personal sense of purpose.
Begin with a stance of True Gratitude. I don’t mean the nonsense of a gratitude journal, but a simple appreciation of how your life is happening for you. Taking simple stock of how your past, your wounds and your challenges present this incredible opportunity to grow and make something of it all. There is, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be another you. You get to ignite your imagination, walk your path in this world and make meaning through your sense of purpose, in a way that never has to fully make sense to anyone else. Forget everyone else’s hand and play yours to the hilt.
This transforms Life into a game. The tough parts are where the growth happens.
Next, you can learn the Playfulness of a Child. Play is how everyone learns, from baby animals to the masters of every craft and skill you ever appreciated—someone had to care more about learning and experience than they did about failure or mistakes.
When you reconnect with True Gratitude and you can embody a sense of Playfulness in life, you open the door to real transcendence. Enough is not an amount, it is a decision. You will be enough when you trust yourself enough to decide what is enough.
“Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation —Everything is waiting for you.”
David Whyte
YOUR PRACTICE today is to simply reframe your Stance in True Gratitude and Playfulness. Don’t stumble through life, it is a dance, it is a game.
Just be, like this today!