New Year, New Realities and How to Create Them
From resolutions to Reciprocity, Self-Truths & Resolves
Do responsibilities liberate us and give us pleasure?
Does our work represent our exceptional nature and function?
When we set our to achieve our dreams and goals, are we in acceptance of the Divine Truth that we are Creators of our current reality?
When we rise to responsibilities, do we realize Reciprocity?
I am not one for resolutions for the New Year. When I did made them years ago, I broke every resolve to myself before the Spring Solstice. This does not work well for trust in one-Self, especially in times of such uncertainty.
Today, at Year’s End, I have instead chosen to feel into the emotions and thoughts that arise when I set with some of the words in my questions above.
Responsibility
Liberation
Pleasure
Work
Reality
…and what weaves them together, Reciprocity.
Responsibility
For me responsibility is synonymous with burdens, pressures, chores, un-fun obligations and my thoughts start with ‘should do’s’ and ‘have to do’s’. The things I am responsible for fall outside the realm of creation and inspiration. Up until this year, I’ve spent a lot of time dancing with resisting responsibilities unsuccessfully; they are as inevitable as grime returning to a bathtub mere days after scrubbing it.
Liberation
Liberation feels like spaciousness after a constricted experience. Like when you get to stretch your whole body and breath fresh air after being in an airplane for half a day. More things are possible now because we have space that we didn’t have before. This is true emotionally, spiritually, mentally, psychically and ethereally as well.
When I’m struggling against something, liberation feels like the desire to do whatever I want, but that isn’t what it is.
In the vibration of true liberation, there is no desperation of fear. I’ve learnt recently, that fighting against something may free you from the circumstance in that moment, but liberation has a longer resonance.
It is like finally getting out of an abusive relationship when you are free from the perpetrator. But if we keep attracting relationships with varying degrees of abuse, we are still stuck in that frequency.
Liberation in this case, is creating space and radiating our new resolved Self, such that we don’t keep unconsciously attracting the denser vibration that keep us in victim-perpetrator-saviour triangle.
Pleasure
Within the limits of physicality, pleasure is certainly titillating and exciting.
Beyond those limits, Pleasure nourishes the Soul, like food does the body. My experience of pleasure is expansive, worry-free, boundary-less.
There are ideas, situations and concepts that make us feel scared and vulnerable and we may want to close or wall off. These become acceptable and start to transform and realize in pleasure states as we touch the bliss of Oneness.
Through true Bliss and Pleasure we become the creators and receivers of what we desire, without needing to figure it out, fight for it or seek it desperately.
Work
The thing I have to do so I can pay rent and feed myself. It can be fun depending on the projects and the people, but in truth, if I had a choice, I something think I wouldn’t work in the way I am (we all are) today. There is a tense equation for me between value, self-worth, validation, serving a bigger purpose, lifestyle, material freedom, independence and income.
I do not actually struggle in my job. Things come easily and I’m good at most things I put my mind to. Yet, there is often a feeling of overarching purposelessness and lack of fulfillment that I’ve been bringing to my workplace recently.
Reality
What is.
I’ve realized recently, that I have a fleeting relationship with reality. I have only been allow myself to accept parts of it. As such, for the most part, I have been relating to current reality through my mental, preference-based, sensory-informed constructs.
I am now learning to relate from a heart-based place.
It is as simply done as waling into a busy cafe, and taking in the scene, the people, the sounds and smells. Taking in a crying baby, a big coffee spill and the fact that my favourite spot by the window is taken up, with as much grace and love as a smiling friendly barista, the divine smell and taste of coffee and a gathering place for the community.
This a shift from mind-constructed reality that we receive to a heart-centered reality that we are participants of.
The above paragraphs aren’t definitions of these words.
They are simply truths in the moment for me today; they are fragments of my work-in-progress consciousness.
I know they will change and shift tomorrow.
And yet, my work today is to know and accept what these are for me now, so that I know how to bring in new perspectives, new shifts, new activities that nourish transformation in the direction that I desire.
This brings me to Reciprocity.
Reciprocity
I have always thought of reciprocity as equitable exchange. But it is so much more than that.
There is a mutual dependance that the vibration of Reciprocity commands and celebrates.
When we resist it, we stay in separation, like some of my truths above that are disconnected from each other. There is such a marked difference for example, between the states of pleasure and liberation, with that of work and responsibility.
I’m now discovering how relational truths are activated by reciprocity, bringing distant parts of our consciousness and unconsciousness together.
There are hidden beliefs within me that keep pleasure separate from work, and liberation separate from responsibility. These help create my reality, where I may perceive dread and heaviness on Monday morning and a sense of freedom on Friday.
Some of these hidden beliefs come from family, obligations, society, religion, history, expectations laid by self and others, work culture and are much bigger that I am.
But some, I have created, consciously and unconsciously.
Perhaps because I have wanted to survive while I interface with the collective consciousness. Or, perhaps this is all I know, it is what I see around me and my perceived reality continues to create same-ness.
Whatever the reason and whatever excuses we have ready to deny it, this is a choice we make in every moment.
In the making of that choice, we create our reality.
We create the ‘same old’ patterns by making the ‘same old’ choices.
We create our debt, insecurity, in-opportunity and poverty.
We create our confusions, struggles, entrapments, wars, discords and through our fear, blames and repulsion of them, we create our own unconscious chaos.
Some people understand this as the Law of Attraction.
In an immature expression of consciousness, if we desperately desire something - like a marriage, a healthier lifestyle or a better job - then what we create is more desperate desire.
This is because our desire is so deep, so massive and is reinforced by our desperation. That is the emotion that propels us.
Our thoughts in comparison are far more fickle.
Emotions, whether we want them to or not, always overlay and overpower our thoughts.
As such the great Spiritual Masters across the lands and times, have left lessons that teach us to know and feel our emotions so that we may be Masters of our Realities, rather than victims and slaves to the present moment.
So what happens when responsibility and work feels like spaciousness and nourishes our soul?
What happens in that moment of work and responsibility - when we have to clean our house, water our plants, plan our work projects for the next month, finish a job, show up when we don’t feel like it, choose a better education system for our kids and figure out how to provide for the present and future of our family?
What does it feel like be liberated in exactly those real moments?
What does is mean to change some our self-narrative and allow ourselves to be nourished, body and soul by present moment, regardless of our preference?
Know now that it is possible. It is also available.
Maybe that means invoking gratitude for the family you have, as there are many who have no-one to call familial.
Maybe that means taking some time to figure out our needs, values, limits and fears and sharing them with our spouse so that together, we can plot a new way forward?
It could be the courage to stay or the courage to leave.
It could simply mean, taking a breath, accepting and befriending today for what it is - a moment in time that will not come again.
This is us being in Reciprocity with Life.
Just as in the forest, the soaring birds are as welcome and as nourished as venomous crawlers, so too, we learn to accept all aspects of our reality from the ineffable spaciousness of our heart.
From here, we become invokers, transmuters, Creators and Masters of our worlds. Not by wishing that things were better or different.
By by accepting what is, so that we now how to nourish the next generation of ideas, dreams, consciousness here and now in the bones and sinew of our Being.
This is not a time of resolutions that are a list of promises to Self or Others that we will break in a few months.
This is a time of Resolute activation within, that opens our capacity for our own truths, our own acceptance and our own Mastery with and in our now present reality (not despite it).
May you know yourself as a Blessing throughout the coming year.