I’ve been revisiting a spiritual book that I have deeply enjoyed over the years. It guides me through different meditations and feels great. The thing is though that I’ve come back onto an early chapter that talks about how you can change every aspect of your life, so if there’s any aspect you don’t like, you simply need to think about how to change it and change it. I get this, I totally do, and I’ve done it so much. I used to have a saying “when things start to change, change everything” because when I would be in the process of changing jobs or partners, I would also change up my hair, change up my clothes, chnage up my housing, change up what I was doing for entertainment and who I was doing it with. Due to this behaviour, I have experienced a lot of different lives and have immersed deeply into them.
There’s this idea that whatever your vibration that’s what you’ll bring in, like attracts like, the simple version of Law of Attraction. I was into this for ages as well where I’d consciously curate my emotional state and vibration after setting my manifesting goals and start living life while watching those very goals become reality. This has worked a treat over the years but as with most things I’ll be hot into in and then it’ll fall away for a while, some things permanently, but then when I’m trying to regain a sense or feeling from my own bygone eras, I would activate those feelings to bring it all in again.
It’s been a while since I’ve been actively into LOA, and it’s also been a while since I actively have meditated on a regular sequence, and the last major silent meditation retreat I went to just over 12 months ago, I left on day 8 versus staying for all 10, something I’ve never done. I started questioning the dog and pony show that is wrapped around it. I’m now questioning the dogma and faith that’s also wrapped around mainstream spirituality and also LOA, which I’d class under that anyway.
What’s made me question lately is that when always searching for “something better” or “even better” in a situation, it puts me on a never-ending treadmill of want, a distant horizon that I can’t ever fully reach. How do you know you’ve reached the “even better” when life is already pretty good? It almost makes me think that mainstream spirituality over the past decade, even twenty years, has also followed along with the supercharged hustle and productivity culture. The constant go, the constant optimisation, and the ceaseless iteration process. I get that change happens and is necessary, but is it needed at such a rapid pace all the time in every aspect of life?
It’s all made me rail against it lately, more about finding and appreciating what’s happening right here, right now more. Not trying to perfect my meditation process, not searching for an “even better” but well and truly being grateful for this stage of life, this life experience in the moment. The constant hunting down of goals makes it to where you’re always looking out, always looking around, always trying to find a way to achieve them. I guess there’s a season for that, and perhaps it’s just that I’m in a different season now in my 40s with young kids, living in a house we own outright, on an island which lives at a relaxed and peaceful state. They aren’t striving here, it’s not the culture, the mainstream culture hasn’t hit here and at first I was still so hyped up on that process of iteration, of finding the “even better” that I didn’t realise until now at the end of my 3rd year here, that I can finally let that go. Even more is that, it’s okay.
What if I just appreciate the community I get to live in, and although I do find it rather religious, there are far worse options and maybe it’s something I can compromise on afterall. What if I just embrace island life and the island pace? What if I “stress-less” as a tradesman told me one Friday afternoon. What if I actually chill out enough to enjoy life right here, right now and see what happens then? What if I stop chasing something else in favour of just enjoying and making the most out of what is right now in my life?
I like this idea, and frankly, it’ll be a fundamental change within myself to allow the ease and flow that comes with this life, which I’ve still been resisting for some reason. Definitely there are aspects that could be improved, but what if I take the next couple of months during the summer holidays and just lean into a peaceful, easy flowing life? I’m up for this challenge. I’m up for this growth. I welcome it.