(The answer.....) it's not out there
Susan Grandfield • 13 January 2021
What should I do?
How will I manage this?
How is this going to work?
Is this even possible?
What is the answer?
We experience life through the questions we ask ourselves.
Whether we are embarking on a new relationship, changing careers, starting a business, buying a house, making financial investments or balancing working from home with home schooling children, we face many questions.
That, in itself isn’t a problem. The questions aren’t the issue, in fact they are a helpful part of the process of making decisions and taking action however…..it can become a problem when we look for the answers somewhere “out there”.
In times of uncertainty we (quite naturally and understandably) seek out answers which will give us a feeling of confidence and reassurance about what is the right or best thing to do. So, we turn towards the people who we perceive to have the experience, data or wisdom that we think we lack.
And that is where it goes wrong!
We give our power over to someone else. We seek answers “out there”.
In doing so, we disempower ourselves by thinking that someone else knows more about what is best for us than we do. We diminish our capacity for creativity by following someone else’s approach. We create a dependency on others which means when things go wrong we have someone else we can blame.
I am not saying we do this consciously. That is precisely the point, we do it unconsciously.
There are many (an increasing number of) people in the world who claim to be experts or who are in positions that society has deemed expert and as a result we have essentially become programmed to seek out the “experts” when we are faced with life’s decisions and new situations. There is nothing wrong with that either.
Seeking out experts is the conscious part, but the unconscious part is that we are often in so much of a rush to get the answer and take action to solve our problem that we don’t allow our own wisdom to take a seat at the table
as well. We turn all of our attention and energy towards enacting what the experts say.
Whatever you are facing right now there are likely to be many experts you could turn to for advice or guidance. There may even be people who are telling you how to deal with your situation without you even asking them (be they public figures or closer to home in the form or friends and family).
A word of caution when anyone is telling you what you should do is that you remind yourself that you are the ONLY AND BEST expert in your life
and what is right for you. No-one else can know what will be right for you so it is about you slowing down, turning your attention inward and listening to your inner guidance.
When you are asking yourself “how do I do this?” listen inside for the answer. It will always be the best answer for you.
Want to explore this a bit further? Take a look at one of my earlier blogs "How can I trust myself?"
What do you need help with?
Part 4 - the way forward In this final part of the series, we are looking at the way forward. What does this awakening mean and how do we stay on the path that we’ve started to walk down?
This is an invitation to be curious about the freedom that comes from finally letting go of the need to fit in, to embrace how you see the world and how you want to approach life and the ripple effect that can have on the lives of those around you. It is all about self-acceptance and allowing.
The struggle of an idealist in a world of pessimists, pragmatists and realists is that at times it can feel very lonely, like we’re sitting on the edge of the crowd not being invited into the conversation. Everyone is looking in one direction and when we point out that there is another direction they could look in we feel dismissed, not heard and ridiculed for romantic notions about the world. But it doesn't have to feel that way.
Idealist: “Someone who believes that very good things can be achieved, often when this does not seem likely to others”. Rather than hiding away, agreeing with others, making myself wrong for holding a more hopeful view of the world or criticising myself for being naïve I backed myself and stood behind my beliefs.
We are under the misapprehension that we need to push ourselves outside our comfort zone if we really want to experience life and be successful. But that is not true. Finding our way back to our comfort zone is a vital part of experiencing life with more ease, enjoyment and freedom.
The reality of life is that we forget and fall into the predictable traps of the ego and its susceptibility to the outside world but that finding our way back to inner peace and stability comes from remembering that our experience is created from the inside.
We are incredibly talented at creating fictitious stories about ourselves and going through life without editing them, updating them or realising we can actually re-write them. Discovering how quickly life can change when you start to pay attention to your stories.
We begin this adventure of a lifetime as wide open, expansive, creative, loving, curious and innately wise little beings full of possibility, potential and optimism. But through our experience of interacting with others and the world around us we, unconsciously, wrap ourselves up in patterns of behaving and thinking which serve to protect us from the perceived risk of following that childlike energy. Now is the time to "unwrap" those protective layers and reconnect with who we really are.
Experimenting is fundamentally about trying things out and not being attached to a particular outcome. It is about giving things a go and learning from whatever happens. There is a real freedom in approaching things with an experimental mindset and I believe it can be brought to all aspects of our lives.
Like me, are you also someone who tends to plan moments of bliss rather than allow them to happen?
Ridiculous as that may sound, I realise that when I am in my familiar environment doing familiar and routine activities I tend to plan for moments of bliss or joy to happen sometime in the future, when all of the things I need to do have been done. I am discovering the possibility of experiencing moments of bliss at any time and without the preplanning.
