We all want to believe that we are in control of our lives, to some extent. We may not have it all figured out just yet but we want to feel that we are running the show, that we’re steering the ship.
But maybe we’re not as in control as we think.
We like to think that we have a fair level of self-autonomy, self-direction, and independence of thinking apart from the world but maybe we’re not as independent from the world as we think we are.
How the world operates in us can be a sort of mechanism that hijacks our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
In other words, something in us has grabbed the steering wheel and is controlling the direction of the vessel: You. And to the extent that we are unaware of how the world operates in us is to the same degree that we are dependent on the world.
This idea of independence and self-automation is principal to the idea of authoring one’s life.
The Hidden Grace in Suffering
Suffering brings many to begin to examine their lives and in this way, suffering brings us to healing.
When you begin to examine your life, you will inevitably come to better understand your mind, your thoughts, and how your thought processes – the regular patterns of thinking that are a recurring theme in your life – operate and manifest in your experience of life.
For many, becoming aware of your thought processes is the first step to understanding yourself and a fundamental prerequisite for gaining authorship of your own life.
Equally, if not more vitally important than familiarizing yourself with your thinking is becoming aware of the inner experience of the body.
Become Anchored in Your Body
When you are anchored in your body, you connect to primordial energy. You could call it Chi but it’s simply an awareness of the feeling of your physical body, its energetic profile or energy field, if you will.
Due to many factors, some known and some unknown, many people have lost touch with their bodies in favor of their minds. This is alluded to in Eckhart Tolle’s ‘The Power of Now’ as man’s fall from grace, when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and gained self-awareness, the ability to judge something as good or bad.
For most people, the mind has a natural bias towards negativity and it will use the events in our lives as fuel for the familiar set of emotions and patterns of thought that have become habitual in our lives.
When we are more in thought than in our body, we tend to recycle these thoughts and emotions over and over again, that is, until we become comfortable with and good at getting in our bodies again.
Coming Into Balance
When we are too top-heavy, that is, too much of attention is absorbed in our minds – and this is “normal” for most people – we can forget completely to feel our bodies.
Through this, the body, which becomes the receptacle for our regular (negative) patterns of thinking and the emotional energy that accompanies those patterns, will come to revolt and will be experienced in the form of physical tension, pain, or worse.
Through gaining more awareness of the body, we take attention away from the mind-story and begin to feel our nature. This has many tremendous benefits including freeing up more attention (self-autonomy), healing pain and unease in the body, and generating more life force in which to pursue our journies.
The Body Does Not Know Time
The body, although capable and prone to storing negative emotions created by the mind, does not know time: it is eternally here and deepening your awareness of the body powerfully connects you to this moment.
From that place, we are free of our mind-story and in the seat of our experience.
This is where true power comes from.
It’s clear, energized, and informed by a higher intelligence: your instinct or intuition, however you choose to call it.
Be Willing to Look At Yourself
Getting to this point of body awareness requires a level of introspection; it requires that you begin to examine yourself and it helps to have motivation or the drive to seek to know thyself. Suffering often provides this motivation.
When you look at yourself, you begin to increase your independence from the world because to know yourself is to see clearly the world in you.
When we can see the world in us through our own self-awareness we begin to move beyond the physiological blockages that are part of the externalized world and dare to feel deeply into our own experience, one that is free from the world.
As mentioned earlier, the way we internalize the world impacts us in the present to the exact degree that we are unaware of it in ourselves. Knowing thyself is to be so completely at one with yourself that you can feel clearly the totality of your conscious awareness. From that place, the world does not exist except through direct experiencing.
You are essentially free and free to create your reality and your life. You are the author of your life.
This is a marvelous journey to be on and the miracle cure for a chaotic and callous world, one that is too top-heavy and out of touch with its nature.
This post was inspired by a YouTube interview with Robert Greene
