“Look at your life from a bird’s-eye view, with a sense of possibility and freedom…”
Ann writes:
This week I’d like to share with you part of an email tip from my friend Rick Hanson. If you don’t know Rick’s remarkable work on turning everyday positive experiences into lasting self-worth, resilience, and inner peace, I highly recommend it. And it’s very compatible with Focusing!
Rick is writing here on the topic “Find Your Own Way.” Focusing is such a great method for finding our own way, because we Focusers have an inner compass – the body’s felt sense – that we can check in with. But if you don’t ever ask the question, you won’t find the answer! I love the questions that Rick suggests here.
Rick Hanson writes:
Consider how you are not living your own life as much as you could. In relationships, do you make more room for the other person’s needs than your own? What aren’t you saying? Whose shoulds or plans or taboos are you living out? (Especially the ones from childhood.) How might you be conforming, even in subtle ways, to scripts or teachings or group-think or cultural programs?
When you get those other voices out of your head, what’s left that’s true? What silence might be speaking to you?
Take a look at parts of your life, such as family or career or a particular relationship. Have you drifted from your own truth in any of these situations? What specific course corrections could you make? What would help you stick with them?
As a frame, know that you can follow your course while also fulfilling your responsibilities. With intention and practice, an inner freedom is available while being externally engaged. You make these responsibilities part of your course, an honorable expression of it, informed by it, an opportunity for growth in your own way.
Open to guidance outside the box. Draw on (for most people) the right side of your brain for images of your current path and where it could be better to go. Listen to your heart: What in your life is truly working for you that you could strengthen, and what is calling to you to lean more toward? Step out of your normal routine for an hour or longer: go for a long drive or walk, take a workshop, spend a day with a dear friend – and look at your life from a bird’s-eye view, with a sense of possibility and freedom: All right, no praise or blame, but where to head from here?
The shift in course could be tiny. It could be simply a matter of adjusting an attitude, or spending 20 minutes a day in a new way. But extended forward over the rest of your life, and meanwhile knowing in your heart that it is true for you, will make all the difference in the world.
We make a life a minute at a time. In this minute, you can lean as much as possible toward your own true way.
As they say in Tibet, if you take care of the minutes, the years will take care of themselves.
