"Life is a balance of holding on and letting go" Rumi
As I reflected on the unfolding new year in last weeks Zoom talk, I made the comment that not every year is a year of great change. Some years serve to stabilize our lives. To say that every year carries the same significant process of change is misleading. This may be a milestone year or not, it maybe a transition year, or time of completion or initiation. It maybe a solidifying year, where the changes we have been going through have a chance to solidify. A year of stability can be a gift. During these pandemic years, the use of social media and news for disguised advertising and competing social agendas has perhaps made us live with the assumption that life is continually being disrupted, with one crisis after another, in a way that makes it more difficult to accept stability as possible.
To positively and spiritually participate in everyday life within the world means discerning what our values and inner directive call us to maintain and nourish, and what we are pulled to change-- how we personally and individually are called to participate in life, with a mind that is open to possibilities and paths we have not yet seen. Two thoughts occur to me as tools in this discernment--the first is writer Portia Nelson's classic piece: Autobiography in Five Short Chapters (see link below). In essence, she is writing about our personal blind spots that get us into trouble in life and in one way or another cause us misery, until we grasp that the consequences of our mindset are simply too painful and self-defeating to continue down the same road, whether that road is our behavior, habitual choices, relationships, or ultimately our thinking. Time, repetition and self-reflection are keys that ultimately lead us to understand we can take a more life-enhancing track. Discovering our blindspots can be shocking and painful. Yet, once we grasp that well-practiced assumptions and habits may actually be self-undermining, we become more open to the second tool, a simple but powerful prayer: "Help me to see where my answers are wrong." This is the prayer that unlocks confusion and self-delusion.
Let the larger spiritual field enter today, already aim especially for that one spot or issue within you that is reaching, consciously or unconsciously, for a new direction...or a new connection. It is entirely possible that the new, paradoxically, is the very thing that ushers in stability. (Susan Nettleton)
for 'Autobiography in Five Short Chapters':
https://palousemindfulness.com/docs/autobio_5chapters.pdf
for a poetic view of unfolding awakening: