The Foundation of Struggle
I spent the first 6 or 7 years of my healing journey willing myself forward. I pushed. I struggled. I dragged myself through the mud. I fought for it. I argued with it. Those first few years of my journey were based on straight up willpower.
Somewhere in the last 2 or 3 years there has been a gradual shift from arguing with and fighting for it to ease, surrender, calm, clarity, and focus. I still have goals. I’m still determined to reach them, I just do it without the willpower and without the push.
If I could give you anything it would be that same sense of calm focus and clarity that I’ve found for myself. It wasn’t something I came by easily, I actually had to struggle to get it. But now that I’ve found it, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
To find a calm sense of focus I had to get over the fear of what would happen if I didn’t push. The fear is what kept me in the fight. Fear is what constantly made me engage my willpower and determination in order to keep going.
Eventually though, I got over the fear. My reason for continuing to push was no longer present. I kept pushing for a bit because the world had taught me that this was how it was supposed to be. With the fear out of the way, now I could push and actually get somewhere. Nope. That didn’t work either.
Before it felt like I was trying to push a box through a wall. The wall was the fear that was stopping me from getting the box to where I wanted it to go. My job was to take down the wall and clear a path for the box. Well, I did that and I still wanted to keep pushing the box with the same force I had been using, but now I landed on my face instead. I pushed the box so hard that it just glided away from me. I lost control over the box. I didn’t need all that force anymore. If I wanted to retain control then I had to slow down and not push so hard.
What’s the moral of the story?
Life teaches us to push and struggle and use willpower to get to where we want to go. It teaches us that the only way to get anywhere is to force your way there. What if that’s not true? What if we can learn the sort of calm surrender that allows us to slowly keep going towards our goals without the struggle?
But how do you do that when the fear has a grip on you?
Question why the fear is making you push. Question why you’re in a hurry. I could never accept that I had time and that I didn’t need to be in a rush. That’s what made me hang onto the fear. But that was the lie in my perception. Because I hung onto the lie I hung onto the need to push and struggle.
Since I know that my life experience will show me what I need to see, what I started to experience was the slow down. I started to see that there was no rush. I started to see the calm that was available to me.
I rely heavily on using my experience to understand myself. So when my experience shows me calm and I’m still struggling and striving, I don’t try to correct the outside world, I figure out why I haven’t slowed down yet. Why do I need to run laps around my external reality? Well, I don’t, So then, what am I doing?
Over the last few months, it’s gotten calmer and calmer. I’ve slowed down tremendously, but other things that I was pushing for at first are now picking up speed on their own.
What I’m offering you is the idea that maybe you can do less and get more. Maybe if you don’t struggle you’ll actually get there faster than if you continue to struggle.
Why?
Because the energy behind it is different. The reason why you do things changes. You’re no longer trying to get anywhere and that changes the whole game. You no longer care about whether you get there or not and suddenly you warp to the goal line. That energy shift makes a difference.
You’ll hear that in spiritual circles all the time. But what does it actually mean? How do you practice that?
Manage the fear and start to figure out how the fear is warping your perception of reality. When you gain a clearer perspective of reality, it will show you a new experience. When it shows you that new experience, pay attention to it. What’s different? What changed? What’s my new way of being now that my reality has shifted?
When you actually change your behavior in response to a shift in your reality and you’re doing so from a place of clarity and calm, you end the old cycle. You heal – intentionally. You free yourself from the old pain. It’s an intentional shift and you’re choosing to accept the new reality you’ve created for yourself. The choice isn’t just a logical or emotional one – it’s a behavioral one. You’re showing your acceptance because you’re acting differently. That’s how you practice the detachment from the goal while still moving towards the goal. That’s the practical way through it.
The clarity takes time. You may have to go around that loop a few times to get it, but you will do it if you keep going. Allow your reality to continue to show you what you need to see and then respond to that in a way that honors the clarity you’ve been given.
To build a foundation that allows you to do this you need a few things:
Fully accept the experience as it is – past, present, and future.
Awareness of yourself within the experience. Consciousness.
Awareness of your own perceptions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and emotions – and how those things affect you and your experience.
A willingness to change and to allow change in your experience.
With those things in place you can learn to understand yourself within the experience without ever changing the experience.
That is the foundation.
That is the way forward that I have learned intuitively through years of healing myself internally.
It is the way forward that I offer you as a practice of healing, clarity, growth, and understanding.
Once you establish the foundation, you can never go back. It is a life long way of being that has irrevocably changed my life for the better. It’s something that I will never give up.
Will you join me?
Love to all.
Della
P.S. You can join my Inner Circle to get started on this journey for yourself. Find out more here: https://innercircle.dellawren.com
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