From birth, our parents, teachers, friends, and other family members teach us to label everything we see. We surround ourselves with walls of belief as these labels become the brick and mortar. Some live comfortably behind these walls – but they are missing the point of life when they do this.
If you choose a walled-in life, you cut yourself off from your spirit, from Divine, and from all the possibilities that require nothing more than a step. It doesn’t even matter the direction – a step in any direction outside the walls of your beliefs is a step toward freedom and infinite possibility.
We protect ourselves from the thing we want most by our beliefs. For me, it was happiness and freedom. For you, it may be the same or something entirely different. Perhaps your greatest desire is peace or prosperity or better health. It is all there, waiting for you outside that blessed wall you built out of beliefs, labels, and lack of trust.
I’m talking about letting go. Letting go of demands of what you believe; the demands you put on each moment trying to make it fit what you believe to be true whether or not it is true.
Letting go of everything we’ve made up according to our beliefs about how things are is just that – made up. We have all those filters in place from our memories of how we believe we experienced an event in our life that we can’t see the truth anymore.
A few examples:
- My feelings were hurt because John said ‘whatever I remember’ – what I remember may not be what was said
- Ann doesn’t like me because she looks at me the way she does – unless I am psychic, I have no idea what Ann is thinking or feeling
- This person did wrong
- That person did right
The truth is, as soon as we tag on a judgment, we are lost to the moment. This includes judging sunsets, the sky, the ocean, animals…everything. There are no exclusions.
Recently I went with friends to see Mesmerica (the link will take you to youtube). I recommend the full version at a planetarium if it appears near you. When it first began, I was all oohing and aahing over the fractals and sacred geometry. It is how I envisioned a good acid trip or how they portray them in movies.
As soon as I realized I was missing the point by labeling everything I saw, I stopped. I took a deep breath and let it all go and just experienced the music and the visuals. By letting go of naming, I expanded my view, my mind, and my heart to what was surrounding me. It was beautiful, and I grew multiple new neuropathways that night without a doubt. I essentially felt a few tiny explosions in my brain as old pathways blew up. Yes, I know this sounds crazy, but that was my reality as I opened to the experience.
Adyashanti also talks about how many of us get so close to realization or enlightenment as we find the emptiness or silence. Something I learned – God lives in the spaces in between. The spaces between the words, between the sounds – the tiniest of spaces we can’t even imagine. The thing is that emptiness is alive! It is teeming with possibility, with creation. In that emptiness is calm, joy, peace, and the possibility of freedom.
Most of us can find the silence, but few step completely away from the wall. We can’t seem to let go of our security blanket of beliefs – our wall we spent years building.
I made a simple new year’s resolution. ‘To be fearless.’ To step away from the wall, to dance with the emptiness that is the Divine.
I will let you know how it goes as the year progresses and my world changes as I step into it fully. Want to come along?
