Ultimately, most lessons, concepts, ways of being, and wisdom come down to some simple truths. We are tempted to seek out easy access external oriented ways to address the symptoms of whatever we are going through. It is our first “go to” for inner fixes when we aren’t feeling our best emotionally.
By this way, this is certainly not a negative approach to working our way through our perils and struggles. It’s actually wonderful and powerful. It just has its limitations. Though, sometimes this may be all we need in that moment to provide relief. Examples are countless but may include behaviors like – “breathe deeply”, “express gratitude right now”, “call a friend”, etc.. etc…. There are so many of these ways to keep us present and centered that we can use often and regularly.
Additionally though, there is great benefit as well to getting to the “heart of where we want to go” and ultimately “be” as much as possible. And I believe that knowing and understanding some of our individual guideposts for balanced living is actually our #1 Psychological/Emotional/Spiritual Task.
I challenge each of you to begin to think big about your inner well being and reach for these landmark tenets that resonate deeply with you. This will give you a GPS map to where you are going and a reminder to always know how to stay on course.
The behavioral additions like intentional breathing, gratitude expressing, and many, many other methods provide us with valuable moment to moment tools to support our larger more complete picture of our journey.
If we are taking a trip, we would like to know where we ultimately would like to go – like California for example. Knowing our destination helps us to focus our direction and motivation. For most of us here in the states, keeping our compass on west will get us to the Golden state or pretty close. We then use the moment to moment actions and vehicles we use to help us to keep moving forward and provide an even clearer focus on arriving more promptly and in our preferred specific region – or in our personal case, the way we would like to feel.
So you have the idea now. Big directional goal accompanied by moment to moment ways to keep me on track.
All that being said, Psychological, Emotional, Spiritual Task #1 is to steadily move from our Selfish states to our Selfless ones. By selfish, I am referring to the Ego’s needs to be Over Concerned about me, my opinions, need to be right, what’s good for me with less regard for others etc…. I am not talking specifically about us being stingy, greedy, inconsiderate etc.. necessarily at all.
I am referring to the psychological aspect of Ego – where we get over concerned with ” I, Me, Mine, Ours etc… Moving into a more Selfless state, we open up, more easily connect with ourselves and others, trust more, fear much less, and live in a much more balanced peaceful state – often enjoyable beyond psychological, emotional, spiritual states we ever could imagined.
This is where we start. This is our road trip destination. Let’s put that into focus, program it into our Individual GPS and begin to enjoy the ride – moment by moment.