If your options are closing-in around you and you feel panicked, scared and helpless, this is the time for action. Your greatest moments of challenge are a call to defy your timid habits of safety and to rush out into life. This is the time to go out, socialize, meet new people, be around friends and embrace living. When you feel the crushing pressure, and you feel paralyzed, don't lay in bed and cover your head with the blanket. This is the time to open your windows, let the sunshine in and breathe the fresh air. Do something profoundly irresponsible like forgetting about your problems for a while: go to a movie, go for a walk, create some art or spend time with a sweet friend. Act as though everything will be perfectly fine — because it will. Life has you and it's not letting you go. Only the frantic stress of fear can harm you. Your calm and centered self knows exactly what to do. In the moments of your deepest need, despair, and desperation, what you need more than any other thing, is calm and faith. Your calm mind is the ultimate weapon against your challenges. So relax. Have faith in your abilities and trust yourself. You are being guided when you need it most — if you will just listen.
What does it even mean when people tell us that we are powerful? We certainly don't feel powerful at times. Being powerful means shifting our minds away from our troubles and into solution-thinking. You can access amazing inner-strengths by focusing on solutions rather than problems. But people often only focus and meditate on their problems, fears, worries and anxieties; playing out endless negative scenarios in their minds. This effectively disables their mind's innately brilliant problem-solving ability. If you relax your mind, it can begin working for you. Your total intelligence knows how to accomplish astounding feats. You just need a clear objective. Get clear. You will surprise yourself! The answer to your problems is to move forward and believe in yourself, which can seem like a risk, but it's not — it's trust. Stretching, reaching and fully embracing your problems head-on will activate your untapped abilities. You would not believe what skill, power and ability your total intelligence possesses until you lose your balance. So stretch! Reach for it. Like falling down stairs, where your inner-genius takes over, and you somehow impossibly catch your balance — your instincts are ready to serve you. But you have to put yourself at risk to activate your instinctual genius.
Throughout the ages, many wise people have said this same thing in differing ways, that you need to accept your experiences, both the good and bad, and move forward. The truth is you don't need to choose to accept anything because you don't have a choice. You are moving forward one way or another. This life is like a roller-coaster; once you are strapped-in and the ride has started, you aren't getting off. Now you can wail and thrash about in a panic, which is no fun at all, or you can just put your hands in the air and give-in to what will surely be a ride of surprising turns, twists, climbs and falls. Just remember how lucky you are to have a ticket and try to enjoy the ride.
One of the ways to love yourself is to make an effort to find good information for yourself. Whether it is love, finances, goal reaching or overcoming our personal struggles — good advice can save us untold pain and suffering. One of the biggest problems people have in life is seldom getting any really good advice from qualified people. Too often, even as children, we receive poor advice for living life, or even none at all. We are also not taught how to pick good mentors. As powerful as a mentor or role model can be, they can be equally destructive if they are misinformed. The lesson here is to learn how to pick and choose your advice from people who have demonstrated they know how to make their type of advice actually work in the real world. If you want better relationships — take advice from those who have good relationships. If you want more money, take financial advice from those who have been successful financially and who also share your values. If you want to be healthy, then learn from those who have been able to cultivate and maintain good health in their own lives. If someone has failed over and over, of course, you can listen and learn from their lessons, but they only have half of the story. The best lessons in success come from successful people, who more often than not have both failed and succeeded. A person who has both failed and succeeded likely has the whole story and can help you with the steps to move forward. You can listen and learn from everyone, but just as there are different levels of advice, there are different levels of listening. Sure, you can learn from someone who has only failed — who has fallen and messed-up, but you can learn even more from someone who has gotten back up and recovered. Find good mentors, advisors and role models for yourself and listen and learn from them. You will be amazed how your life can change with good advice on your side.
Be careful where you get your information. A lot of people who talk about success aren't very successful. A lot of people who teach about business aren't very accomplished at business. There are endless social media experts who haven't accomplished anything with social media. Too many people out there are giving other people poor information; some call that the blind leading the blind, and it can not only be immoral, but it can even be dangerous. If someone is telling you how to be good to yourself — it is reasonable to have a close look at them and see if they are good to themselves. People who talk a lot about compassion often have no compassion for themselves. They want to help everyone, but their own life is a wreck. They go from one failed "uplifting" enterprise to another, but the wheels are falling-off their car, their body is out of whack and their finances are out of order, yet somehow, there they are, "advising people." They want to help everyone when they can't even help themselves. What they really need to do is take care of their own business. The last thing any of us need is ill advice from someone fully out of control in their own life. So before you take that advice that is being offered, take a good look at who is delivering it. Carefully study their energy, their lifestyle, their health and their relationships, and if they are living the life they talk — then, and only then, should you listen.
Some people cannot love you the way you want to be loved because they are emotionally and spiritually frozen. They recoil from or avoid affection. You will never meet a deep penetrating gaze from their shallow eyes; only a surface glance. They will touch your hand with their hand, but never with their heart. They will serve your body but not your soul. They can only connect with you through utility, but never passion. If you need cupcakes or a jar opened, they are perfect; if you need compassion or wisdom, you are all alone. They are only a person as society made them, not as nature intended them. They live life so perfectly but know nothing of life at all. They did everything they were told to be a good person but are hardly a person at all. They are empty. They are dead inside. They will break your heart if you let them. They are usually very judgmental. They see themselves as nice but are often mean and cold. They feel themselves superior. They think everything they do is exactly the way it is supposed to be done. They are repeaters. They lack original thought. If you challenge their slumber with awakened thoughts, they will panic and flee. They will make you feel crazy because they only believe what the masses believe. They are the embodiment of the masses because they have not become their own individual person. Individuation is an attainment of spiritual maturity — frighteningly seldom attained in today's world. You cannot change these people. They are trapped inside of themselves; stunted. You will waste your whole life waiting for them to wake-up to the treasure of what you have to offer. You cannot snap them out of their sleep. Often, only a tragic event will possibly awaken them. Sometimes they awaken during a painful life transition. Some awaken on their deathbeds. Some sadly never awaken to their deeper potential for self-knowledge, intimacy, expressions of feeling and knowing love. Maybe you know someone like this. Or, maybe it's you. Maybe you're dead inside and don't even know it.
Some people have been cut off from their own self-knowledge and critical thinking abilities, but even worse, they are disconnected from the very essence of life. They are missing the unseen essential. Some would say what they are missing is God, spirituality, passion, or a basic value for life itself. They are not in touch with universal gratitude; they do not glow with wonderment or see their life as a treasured gift. They have a distorted view of the world and a shallow relationship with themselves and others. But, they carry assumptions that they have it all "figured out" and that people who do not think like them are wrong, immoral or beneath them. They are cocooned by their comfort of assumptions in a type of developmental stasis. They exist in an obedient, placated "status quo" or autopilot mode of existence — a form of unconsciousness, like a real-life zombie. Unconscious people are spiritually stunted, effectively encasing their unique brilliance in a psychological tumor. Such is the bigot, the misogynist, the xenophobe, the common corporate drone, the condescending academic elitist, the zealot nationalist whose extreme patriotism includes a feeling of superiority over other countries, and the modern-day vapid college graduate, who has only been readied for obedient submission to a life of mediocrity and corporate servitude. But among these unawakened souls are also regular people; not bad people, just normal everyday people in our lives, even people who we love. Maybe we want to know them more deeply, but they are unaware and uninterested in those depths. Maybe we want to go with them on a spiritual journey of great intimacy, but they are not ready for that journey, and perhaps they never will be.
There are ways to live life that some people are not even aware exists. People who have had little self-reflection live life in a huge reality blind-spot. They truly believe that life is a certain way when it actually isn't. It is like a sad inside joke that everyone is aware of, but them. They think they have it all figured out. They really believe they are "good" people. They do everything right — on the surface. They are responsible, friendly, pay their bills and work hard. They put food on the table for their families. They have good credit scores, don't speed and keep a clean house. But something is missing. It is so "missing" they don't even know it's missing. This is the calamity of a conformed life, devoid of self-inquiry and introspection.
You see, it is our pain that connects us to all of the most beautiful parts of life. Love is such a marvelous pain. Birth, death, and suffering show us the essence of life and teach us so perfectly what is most important and precious. We are all made complete by our pain. When the storm of life comes howling and raging outside your window; when you look that tempest in the eye, there will be a quickening in your instincts. In that moment, you will burn with aliveness. Your total intelligence knows exactly what to do, because you were made to weather the storms of life. You will survive, and both you and the world will be transformed.
The beauty of being shattered is how the shards become our character and our marks of distinction. This is how we are refined by our pain. When the storm rips you to pieces, you get to decide how to put yourself back together again. The storm gives us the gift of our defining choices. You will be a different person after the storm, because the storm will heal you from your perfection. People who stay perfect and unblemished never really get to live fully or deeply. You will not be the same after the storms of life; you will be stronger, wiser and more alive than ever before!
