Stopping for a moment is only half of the equation

So much of our healing, and so much of creating a life that is enjoyable revolves around stopping, and then following that act of stopping with very deep listening – listening to our feelings, to our bodies, and to the experiences we are having in our relationships.

So many of the personal struggles that each of us get stuck in stem from not having actually learned at a younger age how to develop an intimately humble student-teacher relationship with our momentary experiences. We get into the habit of avoiding intensity, and so we pass up the teachings associated with that kind of bitter medicine, and even justify not being receptive to the gritty content that life is presenting us. Rather than stopping what we are doing and then listening deeply to these reflections, in various forms of resistance we instead drive harder with what we are doing in the hopes it will get us to the places we believe are best – even though we are making up most of these beliefs as we go. In this habit of basically ignoring the moment, we instead perpetuate these outdated patterns from childhood that revolve around strategies to keep ourselves stable, or to quickly get past any discomfort (as if it has no value).
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Our bodies, hearts and relationships contain ALL the information we need – the information that we are longing for – to untie the gordian knots of old patterns, beliefs and traumas. But without stopping… and without following that stopping with a new and deeper kind of listening, auto-pilot will drive us away from the exquisite and loving insight that might even be a mere few breaths away.

What are you learning right now about yourself? What are you realizing lately about your relationship to life and your place in the world? What illusions have you been burning through that are helping you to see things more clearly? What are you feeling? What are you resisting? What’s happening to you right now? And if you have children, what are you modeling that will help them develop a solid relationship to life that centers around learning from life?