Discipline, responsibility, and commitment! These words can feel very heavy, and many people associate these words with doing something they really don't enjoy very much, or don't even want to do at all. And yet without discipline, responsibility, and commitment, life can become stagnant, boring, and it can be difficult to create what your Heart desires to experience. There is a different way to use your mind to create structure in your life, in a way that balances the mind with the Heart, and allows you to celebrate and enjoy life more fully!
As the ego becomes dissolved through meditation and mindful awareness practices of detaching from compulsive thinking, there is a period of time of decompression. As we begin to see what percentage of our life was motivated from fear and anxiety, we can begin letting go of these patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. In this experience of letting go, there is a sense of freedom, expansion, joy, vitality, and a feeling of connection to a Greater Energy. This can also be a time where the outside circumstances of your life appear to be crumbling. As with any cycle, in order for a rebirth to occur, the old must be allowed to fall away and dissolve. Plants must die and decompose in order to create good soil for new plants to grow. This is what Pema Chodron speaks of in her book, "When Things Fall Apart."
As you allow old patterns to dissolve, many of the things you used to do may no longer feel important. Instead, you find yourself living more for the present moment, enjoying life the way that you have always wanted to. As your mind is quieted, your heart begins speaking louder and more clearly, often against all logic and reason. And this is where focus, discipline, and commitment come in!
As you begin receiving intuition about how you actually want to live your life, you can begin using the mind to create structure in your life to begin allowing this life to manifest. This is often a point of confusion in many people about Eastern spiritual teachings. To let go of the mind does not mean to never use your mind. In fact, that would be impossible. Your mind is constantly processing information from your five senses, and is necessary for your day-to day functioning. The idea is to learn to use your mind very selectively, empowering the creative energy coming from you heart, but to no longer feeding negativity (in the form of anxiety, depression, anger, resentment, frustration, and so on).
To use the mind in service of the heart is to understand what the mind is, and what purpose it best serves. The mind is a tool that creates structure, allowing for an experience to occur. The structures in place at school, for instance, allows for children to have the experience of learning. Using the mind to understand the physical world, allows you to interact in the physical world with greater depth. But when the mind is out of balance, it creates too much structure, too much complexity, and actually restricts the richness, fullness, and depth that the Heart desires from the experience. This squashes inspiration and joy, making life feel heavy, tedious, and overwhelming.
The process of discovering how to use discipline, responsibility, and commitment in service of the Heart takes investigation, practice, and an understanding of how your mind and Heart can work together. Explore different ways to construct your life that supports the new vision you have in your Heart. Create healthy routines that reinforce positive habits in your life. Establish new patterns of eating healthy, exercising, and cultivating skills and tools towards the direction of your Heart's desire. This may take discipline, responsibility, and commitment, but it will be of a different variety. It will fee like an exciting challenge, it will offer rewards along the way in the form of an improved quality of life. This may mean getting up earlier, setting aside time to meditate, spending a certain amount of time in nature everyday, or setting aside time to teach yourself new things.
The first step, however, occurs through dissolving the ego, dissolving attachment to compulsive thinking. Start here, letting go of thought patterns, emotional patterns, and behaviors that are motivated by anxiety or fear, letting go of aspects of your life that you are holding onto out of fear. Let go of everything that does not actually serve your growth or happiness. Come back to the breath, to the stillness within, and wait for the calm, loving voice of your heart to show you what magic and beauty wants to be created through you.
I offer holistic counseling, holistic therapy, and spiritual counseling in the teachings of Eckhart Tolle to empower others to manifest their heart's desires.