Walking Down Another Street
Walking down another street doesn’t mean avoiding the people and situations that trigger you. And contrary to what many people would tell you, walking around the “hole” doesn’t mean setting better limits or boundaries with yourself and the people and situations around you, or even affirming over a thought. It has NOTHING to do with changing or going through life resisting or avoiding or trying to control something that could still show up ‘outside you.’
Maybe you have even come to see how it’s an inside job (to use the poem’s terms, “It IS your fault,”)–ie., it’s your thinking about your situation, and not the situation itself that is the problem. Yet even then, walking down another street doesn’t mean just taking the thought that is scaring you or making you feel completely hopeless and affirming over it–getting yourself to a better ‘feeling place’ by imagining you already have the outcome you want. That’s fine when it works, but when the thought really has a choke-hold on you because it represents an innocent part of yourself that came to believe something, it’s just holds on tighter when you try to push it away.
The Absolutely Reliable Symmetry
Walking down another street means finding out for yourself how everyone and everything (even a thought we can see plunges us into victimhood) is just patiently holding the key to our freedom–until we notice. It’s SO amazing after all these years to learn that walking down another street is not a new behavior or strategy.
It is a lasting shift that unfolds organically from the inside out–
as we begin to rely on the absolute symmetry contained in whatever upsets us.
Walking down another street means living from a completely different paradigm with regard to what appears as the external world. It means I fall in love with ‘the way things are’ every time I notice that my mind truly DOESN’T KNOW whats going on here or what it means or whether a given outcome is ultimately good or bad.
It means that when I feel the ‘ping’ of emotional pain that seems to be caused by a person or situation, I can (sometimes, by grace) rather quickly realize I am in the presence of a blessed teacher who has just shown up to take me to the freedom, peace, and love that is who I really am (rather than the fear, anger, and distance I feeling).
A Frolicking Game of Charades–Life and Loved Ones Acting it Out for US–!
After years of victimhood, I am so awed to (mostly) trust that:
Anyone or anything that has the power to upset or scare or sadden me is just patiently holding the key to my freedom from that very upset (now that I know what to do with it). The trigger, as I like to say, is “the exact edge-of-the-envelope” of my own evolution. Or, as I heard Bill Baren say the other day, “My growth is always whatever lies just outside my comfort zone.”
Again, what I call the Symmetry of Happiness (my new domain name–YAY–but no website there yet!) is THIS:
Whatever has the power to bring on fear, anger, despair, sadness, or the hell of regret (my old reliable hell) has INHERENT IN IT my freedom from that very thing.
Opening your heart and mind to the symmetry held in what you are reacting to gives a reliable shift into a little (or a lot) more heaven than you had before you let it show you.
It is a complete free-fall into love–life as it shows up–trusting that what you have is exactly what you need until you notice that you have something else.It means moving from a place of the most clarity and effectiveness you can muster–LOVE–having compassionately questioned and seen through the thoughts that were keeping you from it. And then letting go of the outcome–in absolute humility that you can’t know what a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ outcome would really look like.
If it’s not hurting, great, you’re living the dream. If it is hurting, great–it’s showing your path out of the pain (once you know what to do with it). So there’s nothing to fear. If you find yourself in a nightmare, as Byron Katie would say, it just means it’s time to wake yourself up to what you’re believing.
It seems we ‘farm out’ the part of ourselves that is played by others to act out where we have separated from them, ourselves, and life. They bring out the stuff we can’t see for ourselves–our blind spots; our denial–so we can judge, react, and project onto them.
Finally Getting It “Right” (The Day After Ground Hog’s Day; The Other Street)
Once we REALLY take a look, we see what we do that feels really LOUSY and perpetuates or exacerbates a recurring problem. When we finally feel SO lousy that we turn over control, and begin to observe what we were believing that was at total odds with what we have, we begin to welcome and love and even serve the very people and situations we thought we could not bear. That’s when we are ‘got it right!’
I don’t mean the kind of ‘right’ like some arbitrary standard outside of us’ this kind of right means we finally saw that the only separation from the perfection of the moment happened inside us–believing what our mind told us SHOULD be showing up instead of what IS showing up.
By ‘getting it right,’ I mean noticing that whatever it is doesn’t look like a problem any more; we don’t resist the reality that is showing up by thinking about it after the fact as if we could change it (that hurts!).
We may still see the EXACT same thing happening in ourselves or others, but we see it as it is–no strings or stories attached. We see ourselves and others in our complete innocence–always doing the absolute best that we can given what we are believing. At this point, our only job is to give some help to the other little beliefs that may pop back up and think they are protecting us by telling us ‘this moment is wrong.’
When Bill Murray finally went with life–exactly as it showed up, even the moments that were IDENTICAL to those he used to despise–he was full of gratitude and unconditional love and the wish to serve; in other words life simply was NOT A PROBLEM.
The ‘terrible awful’ thing simply could not show up as repeating itself, because inherent in his new view was that nothing could show up as not welcome (and when it did, he had started going back and tweaking his own behavior–not cursing his situation).
Once each moment began to look truly fresh and new to him — without agenda or the need to control outcomes — he found he was living the life of his dreams.
Happy Belated Ground Hog’s Day! Here’s to old patterns repeating, until we become willing to be shown.