Make Your Life Simpler

Have you ever wondered what you could do to make your life simpler? Do you long to get more done (more easily) so you could actually enjoy your life more? Pretty much everybody’s had the experience of not knowing what to do next, especially when our responsibilities feel overwhelming and we can’t see any resources that we can take advantage of.

My typical reaction whenever I’ve been in this situation has been to stress out. I’d take a look at what I wanted or needed to get done and in my head I’d tell myself a convincing story about why I couldn’t possibly do it or how hard it was going to be. Then I’d project that story onto my circumstances. That’s like trying to drive while one foot is on the gas and the other foot is on the brake.
Of course I wasn’t aware that I was making it all up, because I was sure I was being reasonable and rational in evaluating my situation. But the reality was that I was distorting the actual facts with a story about why it wasn’t possible, or at the least, why it would be really hard. And from there it would go downhill really fast. I’d wonder why, if I was so smart, I wasn’t getting more done. I had no idea that my experience of what was going on “out there” was only 100% coming from my thinking - it wasn't because of the external events themselves.

What do I mean by that? We usually attribute our experience to anything but our thinking, so maybe we explain what’s happening to us as a result of what happened to us in our past, or, the environment (meaning what other people do or say), but that can’t be true if our reactions to life vary from day to day. One day we’re fine with an annoying boss but the next day they don’t phase us. If our experience was coming from the outside (other people) we would always have the same reaction every single time. But we don’t. So if we think the problem is “out there” then we spend an awful lot of time wishing we could change what’s out there.

Here’s a couple examples of why this kind of thinking is flawed. We generally think that our rational analysis is an estimation of what it will take to get things done. It’s not fact. It’s just a guess. An opinion. And opinions are made up. If I didn’t have any restricting opinions about what it would take to do something, wouldn’t I be far more open to what was actually possible?

The other flaw is that we humans are not very good at predicting the future, nor knowing how we’re going to react. We’ve all been in situations where we thought one thing would happen and it didn’t, or that we would feel a certain way about the process and we felt something completely different. So we don’t really know in advance what to expect. If I wasn’t convinced I knew how things would unfold, wouldn’t I become much more aware of possibilities and resources each step of the way?

Fortunately, what we all have going for us (but rarely realize) is that we’re actually made of that same energy that powers all of life. Whether you call this spiritual energy or simply physics, who we are beneath all our mental chatter and analysis is unlimited creative potential that comes from what you might call a deeper Mind. This is where all insight, all creativity, all possibility resides.
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When we realize this deeper level is always available to us at any moment, we can begin to rely on it to furnish us with new perspectives and new solutions. We’re able to look beyond the “illusion” of our reactive thinking and tap into that creative force that will transform our personal reality.