128 | An Anchor for How We Experience Life
Dear beautiful humans,
I hung out with a friend a few months back, and I was sharing some of the challenges and things in my life I'm not "happy with". I told her about changes I was thinking of making, and she hit me a love bomb. She said, "No matter where you go, you're taking you with you. Maybe there's something within you need to look at."
When you're a kid, you're not thinking about living your life. You're not trying to live life, you're just living it. You're relating to life as it is.
Me as a kid, relating to life as it is.
At some point along the way, we experience discomfort or challenges and start to resist the way things are. Then, in order to change things, we often try to change our circumstances.
Earlier this week, as I came off the trail from a run that was quite difficult, I felt the difficulties of life also weighing on me. I felt an internal storm coming, but I also heard a whisper reminding me that everything could be different if I brought awareness to my perspective.
Shortly after, I serendipitously read something from Peter Crone that put language around this whisper of changing how we relate to life. He said this,
There are two fundamental ways we can change our experience of life. The first is what most people do from birth to death: constantly trying to change their circumstances and what they’re in a relationship with. You want to change other people, the circumstances of your life, and the things you have. You want to change life itself, the past or the future, or how slowly or quickly events occur. The second way to change focuses on how we personally relate to life. One way involves a shift in external circumstances; the other involves a shift in perspective.
When we accept things as they are, we can relate to them as they are. It doesn't mean we don't take action from that place of acceptance, but wishing it was different creates a reality within you that is irreconcilable and as Peter would say, "That's an exhausting way to live."
This doesn't mean we don't make intentional moves to create change we'd like to experience in our life, but that we shift the perspective of how we experience life no matter what the circumstances.
I don’t want to live in resistance to life itself. I want to experience happiness, love, and peace, right now, no matter what the circumstances of my external world look like. If life is like a river, eventually, we realize there’s no resisting it. The river is flowing, and it’s up to us whether or not we will jump in and learn to move with it.
Sending love your way,
Shel
