Oooof! Where do we even begin with this new phase in the evolution of the human mind or shall we call it the end of the human brain? Or a new slavery? Are we all just born to follow and externalise? Is there a time when we can simply be ourselves?
When I used to run my workshops the only “rule” we had was to express ones truth without the need to validate that with someone else’s theory, and speak from a place of realised knowledge and experience as opposed to talk about ones love of the beaches in Goa based on a Facebook entry on someone else’s comments about their trip there. Does that make sense? Another example is the whole idea of spiritual realisation. Ermmmm, where did that come from and who told you that it’s the thing to vie for and the why if your existence. Almost always the answer to this will either be religion, books, community other people blah blah. Very very rarely will you hear someone having been through a genuine first hand experience of shaping their own life purpose by themselves as spiritual realisation for example.
Have you noticed how the world has generated one trend after another throughout the ages. At least since I have been around, I have witnessed:
-the emergence of gurus on spiritual quests,
-vegans, vegetarians, biodynamic produce,
-social media starting with Facebook to whatsapp to Instagram to Snapchat tiktok medium
-yoga healers psychics
-motivational speakers
-self help
-therapy
-podcasting and much more.
We seem to have entered some sort of “I can’t be me by myself, I need to be told to take care of me by someone else” sort of era. It is one thing to seek some form of help and therapy for a little while, and a whole new ballgame, when it becomes a way of life to continuously seek to become a better, more improved, more acceptable version of yourself and imagine a life better lived in a future than the one you currently embody. Well, maybe not embody because of the lack of presence in that life. We are either in the yesterday gone or in the tomorrow yet to come. What happened to the today that will be the yesterday and tomorrow?
When did we become nationals of a world of the courses workshops and words of others as the basis of our next steps in our lives as the way to be? We keep quoting other people in our conversions and still continue to look outward for support.
All that has happened is that yoga meditation mindfulness listening to motivational podcasts and more, have filled the space in you which might have been taken up by say drugs alcohol sex or any other hobbies that you consider as the lesser for you. Feeling that you are now on a higher way for you, this keeps you stuck in whichever conveyance you have chosen. One habit has been substituted for another.
You see the problem here is not the type of habit we form but why the habit is there in the first place. Why do we need a drug? Why do we need alcohol? I am not suggesting that you cannot do as you please or choose yoga if you want. In fact I do yoga daily including my meditations. But, these are tools that are there and not what define me. They don’t become me nor I, them.
It is beautiful that we can imagine a better version of ourselves. Even more magical is if we can accept the present version of ourselves by understanding it’s root and source which only you can do for you. Reading a few books is fine but notice when you start living that book and viewing all through the lens of that book until the next one takes over. It’s the same thing when you listen to podcasts or read motivational literature online blogs and so on and so forth. For that time you become that and live that. So what happens to the path that’s only “you” and “unique”? Somewhere you lose your originality. It’s a wonderful thing to share our knowledge thoughts experience and wisdom but it’s quite another to live from another’s borrowings.
It is comical now that we have all the “self help” “therapy” and all else including the twenty courses under our belt or more of all the positive thinking and furthering it all by becoming healers psychics and all, we have in fact alienated ourselves even further away from each other. Notice how tricky it is to hold relationships right now. Everyone wants to stick to their individuated form and sense of self or that of the community to which they subscribe without giving themselves the freedom to maybe unite by parting some of their sense of self they are so desperately clinging to.
Perhaps the self preservation is now turning us against each other?
If you have already taken one course say in mindfulness and then move on to shamanism then say to listening to podcasts and changing your religion the third time, I wonder what is stopping you from searching the why to your philandering. We are turning our lives into self care brothels!
We don’t need to be told to take care of ourselves or even how to live our lives. We might need someone to listen to us or professional help including counselling and even some self therapy. But to get hooked on this and coup oneself denying a functional life living in the now, is surely good for thought.
The next time you are tempted to sign up to another course or watch another motivational speaker ask yourself when it will be time for you to sit and listen to yourself motivate yourself.
You whole sense of self continues to distort itself in another’s version of what a successful life is. Or what you should wear eat and think.
We flood our kids libraries with books on mindfulness not because we know what it means but because we have lost our minds and true north so much so we cannot just teach our kids from a place of original wholesale but a borrowed rebranded version of truth coming from the outside.
Dare to be YOU!