I pride myself on problem solving. Solutions. Getting to the bottom of things. So when I can't, it can create frustration.
Yoga, meditation, and energy healing have opened me to trust the mysteries we cannot explain. The funny feeling I experience after a deep meditation. The way I know deeply personal things about strangers I've only just met during a reiki healing. And how I can one day not do a yoga pose and then suddenly...can. Or visa versa. Life is full of mysteries and its in the not needing to know the why that we can embrace it's mystery.
We've all experienced it. If we have fallen in love. We can make up the "whys," but in reality we don't know why we fall in love with some people and not others. Sometimes we fall for the "wrong" people, but still somehow it happens. I actually a few times in my life was curious if I could fall in love with the "right" person. Someone who embodied many of the qualities I wanted in a person. And somehow...it just didn't happen. I loved them, but I wasn't in love with them. It's just the mysterious nature of love.
This week's Joy Tip Wednesday is about helping us to embrace the mysteries in our own selves without knowing the why. The patterns we repeat and can't seem to undue. I have a few that I've learned to embrace over time. One I like to call my trap door pattern. The trap door pattern gets activated when I feel overwhelmed. And it's this sense that I want to escape through any trap door out the back and run away to a forest to dwell in meditation forever and ever. Why and where this came from...who knows. Growing up I considered myself quite social, but I also enjoyed time alone. I've learned to embrace this mysterious part of myself rather than fight it. And now that I've embraced it, when it comes up, I know that it is simply a mysterious part of my soul and somehow it doesn't have the same grip on me.
Another is what I affectionately call, extremist Marci. The one that pushes me to the edge. The one that is always telling me to meditate for three hours rather than twenty minutes. The one that gives me a long rap sheet of a to do list during my meditation after berating me to meditate longer. Who does she think she is anyways! Why I developed this pattern is unclear. But it's deeply engrained and it's a pattern that likes to hang around a lot. When I finally gave up the fight with extremist Marci, it stopped carrying the same weight. And in embracing the extremist and my trap door, I started to learn how to embrace my whole complex, mysterious self.
So here's my invitation this Wednesday:
- Choose one thought and behavior pattern that you have that keeps repeating. One that you just can't quite figure out. You know one of those things that you always do, always repeat, despite your best efforts? Yes...that one!
- Make a pact with yourself to drop the need to know the "why." In essence, when you drop the need to know the "why" you also drop the need to fix it. It releases the pressure you've built up against yourself.
- Look for the beauty in the mystery of it. Yes. That thing you are tired of...I want you to find beauty in it. To find charm in it. Maybe it's the quirkiness of it. The predictability of it. The way that it reminds you of someone else you love. (Maybe a family member or friend does the same thing).
- Own it. Own it like nothing else. When I own my patterns and my habits, it's like they suddenly no longer have power over me and I can see them for what they are: silly extremist Marci and the trap door. I can laugh at the patterns when they come. Or at the very least, I get far less frustrated by them because I'm finally owning and acknowledging them.
Play with this experiment and see how you feel. Observe what happens to the pattern you want to leave you. See if the power it has over you shifts. And most of all, see if by embracing the mystery of it, perhaps you become far more receptive to the beautiful complexity that you are as a being...and by extension you see the beautiful complexity of everyone else as well.
Embrace away!