You are not broken. No, really…you’re not.
As I was working with a client last week…helping her to see beyond her habitual thinking around food, diets, body-image, and weight loss, I was struck with a metaphor that in part helps to explain in my mind how we can often get tripped up in our journey of ‘self-improvment’.
I used to see myself and others (innocently so) as a bucket full of ‘stuff’ that muddied up my experience of life. I thought that the only way to be happy and achieve the things I wanted was to empty out my bucket of all the bad stuff and fill it with good stuff.
The challenge then was that no matter how much of that bad stuff I found and cleaned up, there always seemed to be more.
On top of that, the more pro-active I became in looking for the bad stuff, the more I would find.
If I was having any kind of problem I would chalk it up to another hidden subconscious belief that I would have to go searching for and clean up if I wanted to be happy.
“I know I’m not broken”, I thought. “But I sure as hell feel like I am!”
What I have come to see today is that you and I, everyone of us…we are not buckets.
There is no fixing to be done. We truly are not broken.
Rather than buckets to be emptied, I see us as vessels through which life is being expressed.
As life is expressed through us it takes the form of thoughts…memories, beliefs, opinions, ideas, internal productions…and the subsequent feelings that reflect those thought forms.
…because this thought form comes from an infinite source, there literally is no bucket big enough to hold it all. There is an infinite amount of thought energy for us to get pre-occupied with depending upon where we put our awareness.
Understanding how to address the habitual thinking that we can often get trapped in when we don’t realize what we are actually experiencing offers a way for us to break free from the trance that has us mistakenly believing that we are feeling something more than a thought/feeling connection…that there is something more to it than that.
But there really isn’t.
As we wake up from our trance we can begin to see beyond our thoughts and feelings and from this place we can embrace the moment and let our true wisdom…the flow of life…fill our sails.
That wisdom, that flow is always there. It comes from that infinite source. That is who you really are.
That self needs no improvement and can never be broken.
