"The over-examined life is also not worth living."
— Jim Harrison
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It is true that, as the great Socrates once said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
Being mindful (not mindless), clear on your values and in what is important to you, living with intention and aliveness doesn’t happen by accident.
Our society is so guilty of thinking that more means more, that more action means a more worthy life, that you’re a more worthy human.
And it doesn’t.
Often it just means you spin in tighter and tighter circles of habit and should.
Often it means you fear stopping because who would you be if you didn't achieve?
Often the most critical thing you want to do is stop and take a complete reset and realignment.
Do what it takes – journal and consider and reflect, step back and get clarity.
Sharpen that axe and make sure you’re chopping down the right tree.
Put a plan in place and do the things that help.
Yet!
As with all these things, you can swing too far the other way and think far too much about life, becoming far too rigid in who you think you should be, instead of just going and being it, going and living it.
Look, I would be lost without my Ascension meditation practice. It’s given me so much, I can’t even begin to tell you. It’s changed my whole experience of life.
But I do it not so I get good at meditation, but so I can be the best version of me in life.
The beauty of it is that it gives me the inner foundation of being carefree – free from the biggest handbrake of all of us:
The inner critic, that voice of self-management, evaluation, comparison, expectation and doubt.
Self-improvement is not to feed the inner dictator.
It’s not even to create a new, improved version of you.
It’s actually so you can lose everything that is weighing you down:
So you can drop the burden of trying to be someone you’re not, of resentment and anger, of should, of sorrow and depression and worry.
And that means you can live the life you were born to live and have the impact you were born to have,
All with a smile on your lips and a song in your heart.
Hopefully this is obvious, but it bares repeating –
This does not mean you give up your goals, your vision for life.
No.
It means you work towards them without the brakes on.
It means you do everything from a true place of wanting and not needing, of “Yes!” and not should.
It means you live your life because you see fit, free of the concern of what they might think, free of feeling like you’re not doing it right.
Just because.
Alrighty?
Go well (and I mean that – it frees you and speaks to the others)
Arjuna
PS.
If you want the tools to have more good with less limits and more flow, truly, come and learn Ascension.
“Ascension” – to rise above, to go beyond.
Simple, powerful, transformative.
7-9 July (starts 7pm Friday, here in Richmond, N Yorks).
Ask me for details.