Hello loves,
I always have to wrestle with the feelings of being behind in life. It's like I'm constantly on catch up with every project that I do. When I write I wonder why I didn't start doing it years ago. When I play piano I wonder why I never got proper lessons and stuck to them. When I review my spiritual business I wonder why I don't commit all of my time to it. I learned the negative habit a long time ago of using pain to motivate myself to move forward. Moons ago I noticed that when I was in crisis I would be more productive which, people normally are in order to stay distracted from pain and that in itself is something that I've repeated. I didn't understand the destructive power of ego, habit and just how off course I could take myself by sticking only to what I know about pain. Then once I'd begun the process of healing myself the habits I developed around pain became their own problem.
Feeling behind implies there's a destination. A destination implies that there's a journey. A journey implies that there's a beginning, a middle and an end. We know that the physical, human reality we experience is only a part of our spiritual truth. We know that we are one giant moment expressing and experiencing itself. Ever abundant joy is the nature of our momentum. Still, come Sunday evening when I sit down to prepare for my week ahead there is always a slight cringing, shame filled tinge that I “should” be doing “better” at my life.
Part of the reason I feel this is because of some of the roles imposed on my gender. The culture of men, amongst men demands certainty, status and a work ethic that is often sociopathic. I would call it toxic masculinity but that would imply that there's something positive about masculinity at all. I make a real distinction these days between the performance of masculinity and the heart of a man. Still, as much as I have un ravelled it psychologically and spiritually I still acclimated to all of these narratives. The more my life is growing and becoming a healthier version of itself, the more I step out of my older survival based mentality and into a more thriving connectivity. It's in this growth that these old ideas show up.
If I follow all of these old ideas to their conclusions and I apply them to my life right now then all they serve is to make me feel like a failure. There is no greater knife in a mans spiritual belly than the idea that he is a failure, not just that he has failed but that he is a failure. I felt this myself for years because I held myself hostage to an idea of masculinity that was nothing to do with the man that I am. The more I let masculinity go, the more I recognised the points in my life where who I was wasn't going to help me at all in who I'm becoming. Even so, before I started writing this blog post that old voice turned up telling me to write “better”, “do more” and many other variations of “Not good enoughs.”. I thanked that voice and kindly told it that it was no longer needed. I am brave enough now to allow inspiration to carry me forward, I am courageous enough to allow love for myself to be what shifts my butt. When I rely on the template of pain to motivate me I end up like a hamster on a wheel. When I am brave enough to be inspired I move and a whole Universe moves with me.
I can only really fail at a project or a goal if I choose not to learn from it but, I, myself can never be a failure. No human being can. I cannot be behind in life because there is no behind. There is also no start and no finish. Life is not a race, it's a dance floor.
Now, you my lovely, yes you, reading this. Do yourself a favour this week and instead of judging where you are, who you are and what you need to do, put all the demands of your life for a minute and boogie!
Big Love,
Ryan James x
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