To anyone aspiring to make a difference to this world. Be it through teaching, parenting, counselling, coaching, sharing, or through your conscious businesses.
Change Makers’ struggles
Usually idealists struggling with not having enough time, resources and space to do all that they want to do. They might feel limited in achieving outcomes similar to how they see it in their ideal outcome. Hence, maybe doing more but oddly never feeling quite enough.
Likely also one of those deeply connected to the collective pain of the world. But when unable to convey this tangibly, they might fall prey to wanting to prove their worth. To prove that they deserve this place to do this work of change. The pain of not being able to lift the world’s, the community’s or the family’s pain, ironically now, a personal pain.
Avoiding the pain through the frantic search
To conceal their personal pain, they might hustle really hard; to keep pace with the mad world. The very thing that they wanted to undo in the first place – this frantic and disconnected world. The search creates a little relief. The search for intellectual knowledge, spiritual answers, and universal truth. The search for the possibility of finally being confident, enough, or useful; to be the person who deserves to teach, make changes, to share, to have a voice.
Pull of the next great possibility
Sometimes disguised as a passion for learning, the search for answers is also a great distraction that can lead to an addiction. There will always be something more inviting, more interesting, more fun, more intellectually exciting or more sophisticated. The catch is that the great moment is always gonna be in the next moment, rather than in this moment.
Perpetuating the same issues
Maybe consider the idea that it’s not just about wanting to do something different or new. But to learn to fall away from the mad tempo of the world that disguises itself in our minds as inadequacies and pull us right back into the frantic dance. The dance of avoidance, striving or even helplessness.
However, it’s not about losing our curiosity for answers or enthusiasm in learning. It’s about sensing whether we are doing these things to strive or to relieve us from our pain. It comes in the form of stress, manifested as tightness and tension in our body and our mind. If you take a pause, you might sense it right now.
When we play to the tempo of what the world demands, the need for more, more distractions, more avoidance, more fear and anxiety, then that’s what the world will be.
Target the ‘How’; Not the ‘what’
It’s not just about what we are doing, but maybe how we are doing it. Our ‘how’ tends to be perpetuated by our habitual ways of ‘doing’, the habitual way of problem solving, the habitual way of finishing quickly, the habitual way of seeking relieve from pain. It might be worthwhile to slow down and observe our existing inner world; to see these habits clearly, and not just about adding new knowledge or information into our mind.
Is it Enough for now?
When a child is frantic or anxious, a hug can calm or ease them.
Drop in to yourself now. If something deep within longs to rest fully, be at ease, or even if it’s just a hint of tiredness, anxiety, franticness. Maybe learning to slow down, or pause is the little ‘hug’ that we can gift ourselves. That little kindness that might truly begin to transform our inner world, hence possibly the outer world.
As someone who has been through all of the above, I do feel like I am attempting the almost impossible here. To invite someone else who might feel this dire need for change – to pause this frantic doing, learning, and searching – just for a moment.
Rest.
Pause.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
Sensing the wholeness of your being right now.
Repeat again.
For if we don't ever practice dropping into the wholeness of our own being right here, right now.
We might never sense the wholeness of the world either.
Reflect and comment below: What stops you from slowing down? What does it take for you to commit to pausing and resting?
