What if you trusted where your life is going and that things really do happen for a reason? What if you let go of trying to control everything and just experienced each day as it came, doing your best for that day? What if you stopped beating yourself up for things not looking exactly like you envisioned them and instead embraced where you already are?
My guess is that for some of you, the suggestions above seem like a fantasy. But, they really are within your reach if you can open yourself to the possibility.
As the year is marching to an end, we have the tendancy to look at where we are in our lives and to re-evaluate where we are heading. This is a good thing. In order to efficiently and effectively reach our goals, we need to check in periodically and make sure that we are still sailing in the direction that we intended.
Problems arise when we begin to judge ourselves and criticize where we are in our lives in relation to our expectations. An expectation is a standard we set of how we envision the journey to go. Expectations get a bad rap, but this is because we use them as a reason to criticize and judge ourselves. We turn up the pressure when we have an expectation of how something should go and even if we end up where we wanted to be, we are frequently disappointed because the journey went differently than we had envisioned.
Many of us battle with tons of expectations every day: how our body should feel, how our body should look, how we should respond in any given situation, how our day should go, how others should treat us, and so on. We really increase our own suffering by constantly “should-ing” on ourselves. And these should statements are judgments that report to us that things are not good enough or that something is wrong.
Evaluating where we are in order to determine how we can move forward is healthy. Criticizing where we are because it is not where we feel we “should” be and getting bogged down in feeling bad about ourselves is not healthy. This judgmental perspective narrows our view and we can miss out on opportunities in the moment to experience joy, peace, and expansion.
As you are reviewing 2018 and beginning to set intentions for 2019, see if you can take a leap of faith that things are working out the way that they should be. Be gentle with yourself and recognize when you are doing your best. No, things may not have gone exactly as you had planned, but I would also invite you to recognize how much of that was out of your control. Life has its own plan and we cannot expect that we know better than life does. The challenges are opportunities for growth, for expansion, and for connection.
I can tell you with certainty that we cannot see the path. And I can tell you that when I remind myself to stop questioning and judging how things are going, I am able to enjoy the journey much more and things turn out way better than I could have ever expected.
Give it a try and just see what happens.
Chat again soon,
k