30 October 2015
One of the skills I am learning as I grow older is in not trying too hard. There is a skill to be honed in just letting go and going with the flow, in surrendering. In the Recovery Community, they say 'let go and let God'. In the NLP world, we say that to try is to pre-suppose failure. Abraham Hicks says stop trying to paddle upstream, that nothing you want is found there. This translates into having to let go of all sorts of things, from trying to force an outcome I want, and letting things unfold naturally. Sometimes it means letting go of other people's opinions of me, and recognising that they are none of my business. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Letting go does not mean not achieving things, or not having ambitions, but you have to tread the fine line between wanting something, and wanting something too much. It's a delicate balance. It's very easy to spot in others (as judging others is always infinitely more easy than seeing your own faults!) and all you have to do is catch a whiff of desperation from someone to send you running in the opposite direction. In myself, I am learning to be still, and to listen to the quiet voice within. Again, in NLP we say that you are allowing your conscious mind and your unconscious mind to get into rapport with each other. In day to day life this means listening out for those quiet promptings, those intuitions, those warnings that come from somewhere inside, and never in my 42 (or so) years have they ever been wrong. I tend to only get into trouble when I stop listening to that quiet voice inside.
The trouble is, the quiet voice inside has got very chatty recently. She has all sorts of things to tell me about all sorts of things. It turns out she is quite opinionated. And I have to make time to let her have her say. Because while I allow this to happen, and don't stifle it, it makes me feel more alive than I ever have before. I can feel the words pouring out of me at the moment. It's like I have tapped a natural spring, dug a bore hole, and the words, like water, are gushing forth and spraying themselves over everything. But that's ok. I have plenty of outlets for the words at the moment. I have my work in progress novel for the PhD, my work in progress non-fiction exploration about being an Urban Nature Mystic, and I am contributing regular articles to Pagan Dawn. It seems like this could be a lot on top of a day job and a phd, but I am listening to the promptings and following the trail of breadcrumbs, and trusting that if the words want to rush down from the hills like the Wallabrook, then who am I to get in the way. I need to just lower myself into the dipping pool and enjoy the shock of the cold water on my skin.
But in the meantime, I also need to remember that sometimes I need to sit back in my little boat and enjoy watching the riverbanks flowing past.