Hi there,
Long story short: I feel that we humans have signed a contract, where we chose to lose repetitively when we could, in fact, win (winning as in getting whatever a fulfilling life is for each one of us).
To over-eat, to escape behind our phones, to watch a whole season of a Netflix show in a single day, to continue being lazy and scared and stay stuck, and do not work on our dreams. To trash things we love. Or worse, to say we don’t know what we want, and allow ourselves to not even try to figure it out. All normal.
Self-destruction, as in making choices that go against the full blossoming of our lives and hearts (even if in small and innocent doses); is there anything more natural to us, humans? I mean, we pretty much have to control ourselves to not do them.
The natural tendency is for things to get worse. We need to put effort into things to break this natural tendency. Want to keep your relationship as good as it is right now? Still have to work on keeping it. Want to stop being so confused and start taking action in manifesting your dream? Time to work on it. Cause if you drop the ball, then guess what? It won't happen, and it all falls apart. Tough love.
Here are a few things that are not natural for most: working out regularly, eating super-duper healthy, getting out of bed jumping in joy eager for a brand new day, surrendering completely to what we truly desire, meditating 30 minutes per day. Isn’t that crazy? All the “good stuff”, light, is in a way unnatural. That means that… darkness is natural. Scary.
Good thing that unnatural does not mean impossible. It’s like cleaning: you don’t need to do anything to get your place dirty, besides just stopping cleaning it. But cleaning is not that hard. This constant effort to simply keep things as good as they are, is, for me, the biggest trace of the human condition: that we need to keep taking action against what is natural. To choosing life and expansion over death and stagnation, over and over again.
To choose walking forward, to choose good, to choose love, to choose light, requires unnatural work, awareness, presence, and discernment. No surprise that we so easily fail — that is what I meant in the beginning by having a contract where we choose to lose when we could win. Rings a bell?
We may all have a good heart, full of lightness and dreams at first, but all these goodies can be easily turned off if we drop the ball and allow the natural tendency of things to take us.
To keep bringing light into our lives is a lot of work, possibly the hardest work there is in human reality — and that’s why we resist it. We make excuses, and we find them poetic, even. We normalize it, and we make self-destruction cool.
Who wants to hear about an artist that has always had all her/his shit together, anyway? We can empathize with another broken soul struggling, but a person who is actually successfully living in the light, day after day? Dark is sexy, and light is… boring.
What an amazing twist for self-destruction to pervade. Isn't it kind of funny in a way? We say we fear death, but we have normalized choosing death over the growth of our lives without realizing it. That sounds to me like we are kind of in love with the darkness — possibly more than we are with the light.
The truth is, we have a huge resistance to light. To be too good, to grow beyond our limitations, to be too loving, too daring; all these break us at some point. Sure we all have our demons. But one thing is to look at it, accept it AND start transforming it — another thing is to just leave it hanging there. It’s like we have accepted to be little demons and the light burns us.And that is scary stuff. The demons we allow to reside inside of us show us where our resistance to light lies. That is where it all becomes too much for us and we cannot take more love.
If the world was a balanced, neutral place, it would be as easy to go to either side of the equation, but that is not how it works down here; it’s more like there is a magnet in one side of the equation. That’s the drama of our human condition: we can’t stop doing the dishes. We have to keep going and do what is in a way unnatural.
To want things to get better means we are to pick up a fight. The fight does not need to be a struggle, it is a fight of warriors who fight for love, for we want our essence and our hearts to expand, in joy. It is a fight that invites us to constantly stoke the fires of our hearts, to keep ourselves alive and burning. Because if we fight because we “have to”, deep down we are doing it out of fear of collapse, instead of love for life and for ourselves.
How do you feel about that friend who tells you she/he took it easy and watched a whole season of a TV show over the weekend, versus a friend who dedicated her/himself fully to a personal creative project over and over again? Who do you empathize with?
See you next week,
Aline