“You feel suffocated by the ways of the world because you are here to taste a new way.  The see-saw of life, between hope and fear—there is nothing like facing your own demons and battling yourself.  These fears are coming up so we can alchemize them,” Ashmi Pathela.  Going out on the limb and doing things against the norm feels uncomfortable for anyone.  It’s a practice we can learn and do over and over again but the beginning of something new is always rocky.  We are learning to gain our footing as we did when we were babies learning to walk.  We knew we wanted to and it’s a little unsteady at first—we fall down a lot—but we keep going.  The irony of some of this is that we are creative creatures meant to advance the world so we are often diving into unchartered territory, yet it feels uncomfortable to do so—and we are still drawn to it.  With enough practice, we learn to listen to the beat of our own heart more and trust our internal sense of direction.  Soon going against what feels natural for us weighs us down.  It gets shaky as we try to navigate what we know and what we are creating with what we feel.  The goal is to spend more time tasting a new way, taking our lessons and building on them, spending more time in hope than fear.  When we emerge from the depths of fear, we can breathe in hope and we can take all we know and make it into something else.    

Let’s put this in context: Over the last few days we talked about not missing out on the important moments in life followed by understanding the important moments aren’t about perfect.  Life doesn’t stop because things aren’t aesthetically pleasing; life is all the time.  Every moment becomes important.  From birth our society trains us to believe we have to follow a certain pattern and that there is only one path to happiness (or that the paths are limited), there is one path to success. We are told that these limited ways are the “right” way, that it’s good for us.  We are taught only the big things matter. Meanwhile we feel the exact opposite—that there is something more for us, that we are fulfilled doing something off that path.  The conflict causes us to feel drained more often than not, we live in distraction, we feel that there is something more and we ignore it.  We get so close to what we want, we start and we stop because we vacillate between hope and fear, thinking we can do anything and thinking we have no chance at succeeding.  The mind is a powerful thing, something that can tell us to act against our instincts because the crowd is safer—it’s innocuous but if we listen too much we forget the crowd keeps us unseen and drowns out our instincts. 

When we trust the crowd for too long, it takes some time to know that it’s all in our heads, that we need to calm the internal negative voice and drown out the external distractions to understand how we feel.  We are meant to take those fears and build them into strengths understanding that we can overcome anything.  Not just overcome, but that we are architects meant to create something far greater.  The greatest demon we need to fight is the urge to quiet the voice of our true calling, the one that tells us we aren’t good enough, that things need to look a certain way to be good enough, that we can’t enjoy life until it is a certain way.  Learn to trust what we know and use each of those doubts and fears to build a staircase right above the water and breathe in the sustaining breath of our purpose and life.  Quiet the demons inside, ignore the distraction outside, and we win every time.  Trust our power and know we are meant to build and create. Trust the instinct and breathe in our power.