Opening Yourself to Flow

One of our lovely students sent me this when she saw it on a wall in Bristol. Its so funny that when you are open to receiving messages they seem to appear all over the place, especially when you aren't looking for them - we start to see wisdom in anything and everything.

I get a wonderful stream of these sort of things in my inbox, from friends who have decided to confront their imaginary fears and start to view their life in a very different and open way, through to students dropping a lot of things in life that they feel they do not need any more, views and baggage that doesn't serve them anymore as they start to unresistingly accept the flow of things as they come.

Non-Resistance is a topic that often crops up on our courses in conversation-generally the idea will initially throw up a lot of resistance in itself!!

You will often hear 'But why do these things happen to me. How can I not resist them?!' 

This is one of the greatest misconceptions of human perception, it is typical of the victim mentality, the 'poor me' state of mind that so many of us dwell in.

The clear misconception here is that Life doesn't happens to you. Life Just Happens! You are an integral and inseparable part of life and therefore if cant happen to you. Life, along with you as one of its infinite parts just unfolds as it unfolds. If you choose to assign some sort of separation and victim or victor mentality to this then that is a conscious decision that you have made.

You see 'Why do these things happen to me?' defines the separation that we feel between us and the rest of  our perceived 'reality'.
There is, never has been and never will be any separation other than that which we create ourselves in our minds and then  play out through our actions and speech. 
We just imagine that we are separate. If I'm not 'me' then who am I? And what is left of me when Im no linger 'me' is the great fear. So we then spend the rest of our life consolidating and reinforcing this 'separate me' figment of our imagination, entering into a cycle where we actually do feel more and more separate, because thats exactly the reality that we are creating.

As Buddha said in my favourite line ever 'With our thoughts we create the world'

And if we feel that we are separate from a world that is indifferent to us, that doesn't care for us, imagine how that affects our state of mind on a daily basis as well as our actions and life choices . 

So how do we break this cycle?
This starts with self-awareness and ends with self-awareness. We need to become familiar with the workings of our own minds 'We cant fix the problem if we don't know what the problem is'. 

Through self awareness and internal observation of ourselves and our minds we begin to slowly realise that almost all of the time we don't even understand our own intentions, reasons and thinking. We start to see how this plays out in our behaviours, fears and judgements as we base them on our misconceptions, aversions  and attachments.

It soon becomes very evident that maybe our fixed view of what is going on around us might just be a little mistaken?!

Suck it and see for a day. I dare you :)