Moving Beyond Your Limits
What if you could move beyond the limits of what you think is possible?
I don’t mean that anything's possible if we just believe hard enough. And I'm definitely not suggesting we can just think ourselves into perfect health, financial freedom, or whatever else we might want. I’m talking about something much closer to our everyday experience: the ways we gradually come to live according to unquestioned assumptions about who we are, what we can do, what life is supposed to look like, and what is or isn’t available to us.
Some of these assumptions are easy to recognize: I’m not creative. I’m too old to start something new. I could never do that. This is just the way I am. Others are less obvious because they don’t feel like assumptions at all. They feel like reality. But that's where the real issue lies.
Much of my own work has been about discovering how those limits get created and what happens when they begin to loosen. I've lived with those limits, too, so I know how it felt when my world started gradually shrinking.
So what do we do? Sometimes we need to let go: of the need to know what will happen, of insisting on a particular outcome, or of the belief that we should somehow be able to control what comes next. This doesn’t mean becoming passive. It means making room for something other than our own predictions and preferences.
Making things with our hands is another doorway. When I paint, I rarely know exactly where I’m going. I put something down, respond to what appears, change direction, cover something up, add something new. The painting develops as I participate with what's on the canvas from moment. Making gives me access to a way of knowing and experiencing beyond what thought and language contain.. And I've learned that making gives me direct experience of something I can easily forget: not knowing what comes next doesn’t mean there's nothing going on. Not knowing is often what's needed for some new idea to appear.
And then there are the limits of thinking itself. Thinking is obviously indispensable. We need it to plan, make decisions, solve problems and get through an ordinary day. But thinking is based on what the mind has already stored. The problem comes when whatever our minds come up with becomes the limit of what's possible for us. That's when we unknowingly reduce life to the boundaries of our own experience, expectations and fears.
Any one of these things can give us an escape hatch: Letting go loosens our grip on what we think needs to happen. Making lets us experience what can emerge when our minds get quiet and we're immersed in something outside the boundaries of language. And recognizing the limits of our thinking invites us to ask the question, "What else is possible?"
There's a sense of aliveness that comes out of questioning what you think you already know. You can try something you’ve already decided you won’t be good at (like singing or drawing). Or you might question the way you describe yourself. Or you might allow yourself to let a question remain unanswered for a while. And one of my favorites is noticing that the future you’re spending so much energy worrying about exists, at this moment, only in your mind.
Moving beyond the limits of what we think is possible begins not with some grand leap into an entirely different life, but with becoming a little less certain that the life we already know is the only one available to us.
I don’t mean that anything's possible if we just believe hard enough. And I'm definitely not suggesting we can just think ourselves into perfect health, financial freedom, or whatever else we might want. I’m talking about something much closer to our everyday experience: the ways we gradually come to live according to unquestioned assumptions about who we are, what we can do, what life is supposed to look like, and what is or isn’t available to us.
Some of these assumptions are easy to recognize: I’m not creative. I’m too old to start something new. I could never do that. This is just the way I am. Others are less obvious because they don’t feel like assumptions at all. They feel like reality. But that's where the real issue lies.
Much of my own work has been about discovering how those limits get created and what happens when they begin to loosen. I've lived with those limits, too, so I know how it felt when my world started gradually shrinking.
So what do we do? Sometimes we need to let go: of the need to know what will happen, of insisting on a particular outcome, or of the belief that we should somehow be able to control what comes next. This doesn’t mean becoming passive. It means making room for something other than our own predictions and preferences.
Making things with our hands is another doorway. When I paint, I rarely know exactly where I’m going. I put something down, respond to what appears, change direction, cover something up, add something new. The painting develops as I participate with what's on the canvas from moment. Making gives me access to a way of knowing and experiencing beyond what thought and language contain.. And I've learned that making gives me direct experience of something I can easily forget: not knowing what comes next doesn’t mean there's nothing going on. Not knowing is often what's needed for some new idea to appear.
And then there are the limits of thinking itself. Thinking is obviously indispensable. We need it to plan, make decisions, solve problems and get through an ordinary day. But thinking is based on what the mind has already stored. The problem comes when whatever our minds come up with becomes the limit of what's possible for us. That's when we unknowingly reduce life to the boundaries of our own experience, expectations and fears.
Any one of these things can give us an escape hatch: Letting go loosens our grip on what we think needs to happen. Making lets us experience what can emerge when our minds get quiet and we're immersed in something outside the boundaries of language. And recognizing the limits of our thinking invites us to ask the question, "What else is possible?"
There's a sense of aliveness that comes out of questioning what you think you already know. You can try something you’ve already decided you won’t be good at (like singing or drawing). Or you might question the way you describe yourself. Or you might allow yourself to let a question remain unanswered for a while. And one of my favorites is noticing that the future you’re spending so much energy worrying about exists, at this moment, only in your mind.
Moving beyond the limits of what we think is possible begins not with some grand leap into an entirely different life, but with becoming a little less certain that the life we already know is the only one available to us.