Learn to feel the support of Life itself
There are four principles for fulfilling your potential in life: this article is about the third principle, learn to feel the support of life itself.
Overview
There are 3 “marriages” in Life: the marriage with your work, the marriage of love and the marriage with yourself.
We can fulfil our potential in each of these areas by paying attention to 4 key principles:
- Make the most of what is special about you.
- Overcome your inner obstacles to fulfilling your potential.
- Learn to feel the support of Life itself.
- Take action to improve your life.
Learn to feel the support of Life Itself
You are not alone.
You have never been alone. You are an intrinsic part of a biosphere -mother earth- and an unimaginably large universe. You have never been separated from it nor will you ever be. Every religion in the world has a mystical wing, and all those mystical traditions teach the same thing, which is how to experience yourself in the oneness of everything. God is everything. Even a hint of recognising your true nature will change your life.
There are two dimensions to life: Life as a journey, where you grow and develop yourself on the road to fulfilment. But the downside of viewing life as a journey is the idea that there is a destination. People make themselves desperately unhappy trying to achieve what they think will make them happy. Given your environment, your genes, psychological history and the culture you grew up in, there may be some things in life you cannot change, or cannot change through your own effort.
The other dimension of life is Life as Being, letting things be just the way they are. If you listen to music, you want to enjoy every note, rather than reach the end of the song. There is no destination, just the present moment. In this dimension of life there is nothing to achieve, nowhere to go, except noticing the magnificence of consciousness and being. If you recognise that God, or Buddha-nature or the Tao or consciousness is your essential nature, then there is nothing to improve or change. Things will change naturally of their own accord without any effort. You grow through grace, not effort.
I have written lots of blogs about this recently, and my essential advice is to find a mystical tradition within your own faith if you can; or develop your own practice, borrowing ideas from different traditions to create something that is an expression of your direct experience of the mystery of life. I will be running a workshop called “The Vast Sky” on how to develop your own practice in the Spring.
The two dimensions of life, “Life as a journey” and “Life as Being” are both important to attend to. In Buddhism they are called “the two wings of the bird” – they are both needed to enable us to fly.
When we are skilled at making the most of what is special about us, and overcoming inner obstacles to self-expression AND we know through attention to Being that life will be over in a flash and none of this is too important, then we can take action in our lives on things that are important without making them TOO important. This is wisdom.
This third key principle, “Learn to feel the support of Life itself”, is key to enjoying the magnificence of being alive, increasing your well-being and reducing the everyday stress of life.
If you want to read more about learning to feel the support of life itself, you might enjoy the article Liberate Yourself: how to feel the support of life itself.
The fourth key principle of fulfilling your potential in life: Take action to improve your life, can be read about here.
This blog is part of a series on the four principles of fulfilling your potential in life. You can read about these principles in the following posts:
- Make the most of what is special about you.
- Overcome your inner obstacles to fulfilling your potential.
- Learn to feel the support of Life itself.
- Take action to improve your life.
