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Have you longed for a particular relationship, job, creating a family or a spiritual realization only to discover that after achieving these things you’re still struggling; still not happy? You discover that these accomplishment themselves are not inherently the key to your deeper sense of happiness?
Yesterday I was caught feeling the familiarity and stuckness of a well-worn cycle of longing. This longing has yet to take shape in the practical world. I see glimpses but I don’t abide in this place yet. How often do we sense a longing from deep within and find ourselves gently holding it like an exquisite hummingbird that startles us with her beauty as swiftly as she disappears?
What does it mean when life, as you’ve known it, suddenly changes in a blink of an eye and you find yourself dropped into the desert and the unknown? Or maybe it happens so slowly that you wake up to realize everything in your life has been dying for months or maybe even years. However you find yourself here, you are now standing at the threshold of realizing that what was previously so important to you no longer holds its place on the trophy shelves.
I recently participated in a Hakomi weekend; a somatic based mindfulness-training. The message I received in the stillness and quieting of my mind was, “Just rest. You will know when you need to know”. As my mind spun through the various scenarios in my life that ‘need’ tending or ‘fixing’, this voice stopped me in my tracks. What is most true is that any effort for me ‘to know‘ only prolongs my capacity to feel the gifts in my life right now.
For much of my life I was caught in the web of what I call, ‘The Self-Improvement Campaign’. This ‘campaign’ is the false notion that somehow we are deficient. Therefore, in order to be happy, successful and belong we have to improve ourselves. In the process we compare ourselves to others and the ideas of who we think we should be. What we end up feeling is a disconnect on the inside.
