Welcome Those Things That Call Your Life Into Question
It is inevitable in life
that certain circumstances, events and experiences
will call your life into question.
they will cause you to reevaluate your life.
For example:
When someone gets married, it might cause you to question
the quality and satisfaction of your own relationships,
or the sacrifices you might be making for the sake of your career.
When you go through a breakup,
it may call into question your identity.
It may force you to re-evaluate your own behaviors
and thoughts and desires.
when you start feeling stuck in your endeavors,
you may start to wonder what or who you are doing it all for.
When you come across some information or an experience
that causes you to question a belief that you have always held,
it may make you question
so many of the decisions you've made up to this point.
It may cause you to doubt the people whom you have depended on
to tell you what is true.
When someone dies,
it may make you existentially question life itself.
It may make you question what is important in your life
and who is important.
It may make you completely re-evaluate
what you are doing with your time.
We don't like to re-evaluate.
We don't like to question ourselves
or other people, or our life in general.
It makes us feel really really vulnerable.
The majority of people on the planet
are under immense pressure to have it all figured out
all the time.
Now obviously,
questioning ourselves runs right up against
this subconscious or conscious expectation that we have of ourselves
and even of other people.
Also, we don't like to be forced
into a position where we're questioning
or having to re-evaluate our life.
And forced to do this
is what we feel when we encounter these experiences
or these events or circumstances that cause this questioning.
It feels like it's something that's happening to us,
beyond our own free will.
This in turn, makes us feel destabilized and insecure.
We feel like the rug of certainty
is being pulled out from under our feet,
and we also feel shame.
Because of this,
if you are in one of these situations that causes you to question your life,
I suggest you watch my video titled:
Uncertainty (How to Deal with Uncertainty)
All people have been socialized
to believe that they should do the right thing,
or be the right way.
And when our life is called into question,
it causes us to start to doubt,
or feel insecure about whether we have done the right thing
or are being the right way,
or have done the right thing,
or have been the right way.
What this does, is it causes us to slip into insecurity,
and to a total lack of confidence.
Now, the way that most people respond to this lack of confidence
and slip into insecurity and vulnerability
is that they immediately go into defense mode.
So what we tend to do when we're in this questioning phase
is start to violently defend to ourselves and to other people,
what we have done or what we are doing,
even though we're not even convinced.
Because of this,
we naturally resist anything that calls our life into question,
or that causes us to reevaluate.
We feel that nested inside of these events circumstances and experiences
that cause us to question ourselves or our lives,
is some kind of a personal failure,
some kind of inherent wrongness or badness about us
or something that we've done.
But, what is really nested inside of these experiences
is the calling for positive change
and the calling towards life improvement.
This means what is actually nested inside of these experiences
that call our life rather harshly into question,
is the potential of:
"The better it gets, the better it gets."
Because of this,
we should welcome them.
We also need to realize
that these circumstances and events
are never going to stop coming.
I mean literally never.
They will come to us in the form of people we meet,
things we read,
things we watch...
The world is literally offering us
these experiences all the time.
Embrace the idea that you can never be 100 % sure.
You're obsessed with knowing because you think that if you know,
you can prevent unwanted things from happening.
But the state of learning is a higher state than the state of knowing,
because it is a state that is open to all possibilities,
including possibilities that will offer
much more happiness than you have now.
Knowing is a state of endedness.
You are here to expand, to evolve and to progress.
This means that you must open to the idea
of adopting a different and better truth down the road.
Having an open mind
is akin to having a life raft on the river of life.
You can metaphorically take that raft
and ride the rapids of the current of life.
When you welcome the calling of your life into question,
you become curious about where this life is going to take you.
If your life journey were compared to a river,
most of us spend our lives
trying to control the current of the river,
we don't consciously know where the river will take us.
Some of us only know where we would prefer for it to take us.
We can develop practices
and take actions and think thoughts
that make this trip down the river a journey of more ease.
But in order to embrace
the circumstances that cause you to question your life,
let go of the idea that you can control the river.
This is what we're trying to do
when you try to find and hold to an affixed solid answer,
or a way of thinking and behaving in our life.
What does this universe want to show you
and where does it want you to go?
With that kind of curiosity comes a willingness to change course completely.
What doing this causes,
is a rooting into improvement in and of itself,
instead of a rooting into that which can be destabilized or lost or changed.
It's at this point that I have to present that idea in another way,
because this is going to change your life
if you're into self-improvement;
If you want to suffer through the process of self-improvement,
through the process of growth,
through the process of life in general...
Affix yourself to something that can be changed.
What do you do instead?
Affix yourself to improvement in and of itself.
Then you're not going to suffer so much.
Because this calling for positive change and improvement
is nested inside of these experiences
that cause us to question our lives completely,
it's very important to welcome them.
Now, when I say the word welcome,
so much of society, no matter where you are in the world,
has this connotation with welcome
that you should want these things
or feel super happy about them.
This is not what i'm asking of you.
Why? Because you can't force yourself
to feel great about a divorce,
or great about the death of a loved one,
or awesome that somebody just made all your previous choices
seem like they were done from a really limiting belief.
Welcome means you don't resist it anymore.
You're not fighting to keep those experiences out.
What you can do is to,
metaphorically speaking, open the door for them
and invite them in for tea when they arrive.
Greet and receive them.
Instead of resisting the fact
that you're experiencing something that's causing you to question your life,
actively and willingly get on board
and question your life.
Actively seek new and different and more information.
Look through the lens of different perspectives.
Questioning when the intention behind it
is to truly be open to different answers,
is always an open door
to better information,
to better answers,
to a better life.
The people who are the most aware
and the people who are in fact,
the most joyous,
are those people who are the most willing to question their life
and make changes to it.
And I mean, over and over again.
Now, if you're able to form this association
that these circumstances that call everything into question
really are the container
for the opportunity for improvement,
then this positive association that you're going to form with them
will open you to the idea that
contained within these experiences is possibility.
Possibility for things to get even better.
And with that association, these circumstances
that would make you feel pain,
it's not like you're going to not feel pain at all,
but it will be much less pain
than you would have experienced otherwise,
if you didn't see that inherent link
between these circumstances, events and experiences
that call your life into question,
and the opportunity for improvement.
We tend to make an enemy,
because we're expected to know it all, all the time,
we tend to make an enemy
of, you know, calling our life into question.
But I want you to think about where we would be as a society
if people hadn't done this,
if people hadn't been in a position to question their whole lives
and to rethink the thoughts they originally thought.
How many inventions would never have been invented?
How many barbaric practices would still be practiced?
I can tell you the buddha would have continued his entire life
being lived out on a satin cushion as a prince
and never found awakening.
Abraham lincoln would have stayed retired after the senate elections
and never become president,
and the United States would be in a very different spot
with slavery and segregation today.
Where the hell would you be,
if you continued thinking and doing the same things today,
as you did 10 years ago,
or 20 years ago,
or 30, or 40 years ago?
Long story short,
if you want a life experience
where you can line up with your growth
in a way where you feel joy,
instead of like there's some personal failure
every time that your life is called into question,
let those questions come.
Welcome those circumstances, situations and events
that cause you to re-evaluate your life
and call your life into question,
even if they happen every day.
See them for the improvement opportunity inherent within them.
We can address the resistance
that some people have to keeping with the course,
or following through, or dependability
in another episode.
That's not what this episode is about.
For the sake of this episode,
you must know that there is absolutely no shame,
nothing wrong or bad
with changing course in your life,
over and over again.
We would hope that if you had encountered a better idea,
that you would throw the old ideas overboard,
or at least put them in a toolbox where they belong,
to be used in the circumstances in which they should actually be used.
You must stop and re-evaluate and question,
to be sure you are on the right path,
and or to figure out what the right path for you actually is.
So be brave enough to open that door
and welcome in those circumstances,
events and experiences
that call your life into question.
Be brave enough when change comes knocking at the door,
to open that door.
Have a good week.
If you like this video,
be sure to share it, like it and also subscribe to my channel
so you can see more content like this.
But I want to personally thank you, for taking the initiative
and having the bravery to step into the space of awareness.
Not only for yourself, but for the benefit of those around you.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte