Enormous parts of our lives go completely unexamined. For instance, have you ever given any thought to whether your view of life supports you? And if you’ve ever stopped to wonder about this, how would you even know if life were supporting your worldview?
Don’t worry if this is something you’ve never considered. Very few of us probably have. It’s a tremendously valuable question to ask, because it’s the best possible litmus test for how aligned or out of alignment you are with life.
If your view of life supports you, it’s easy to tell. Life will seem fairly easy, regardless of your circumstances. Just to be clear, this includes people who might be regarded as having “high-stress” jobs or lives. Living in synch with life means peace and well-being will be familiar to you, not some ideals you hope to experience at some point down the road.
If you’re out of alignment with life, in other words, if life isn’t supporting your worldview, here’s how you’ll know: you’ll spend your life with an uneasiness that presents itself as a shitty feeling. This shitty feeling will consist of a sense that you’re never quite where you should be, that nothing is ever quite right, and that life is a threat. This will be accompanied by a general absence of peace and well-being.
If the feeling I’ve described is familiar to you, I’m going to suggest that the problem isn’t with your life, but with the way you’ve learned to regard it, and what you expect from it.
The expectations we have about life are another area that most of us have probably never given conscious thought. It’s probably safe to say that we assume the view we have of life, and what we expect life to deliver to us, are exactly what life has to offer.
In other words, we think we’re the boss of life. Put into those words, it sounds absurd. When we look at some assumptions we’ve held for many years, when we really take a close look at them, a lot of our behavior can seem absurd. But there’s no reason in the world not to laugh at it, just because we’re the butt of it.
It’s that kind of healthy laughter (and laughing at ourselves is always healthy) that can help us see something that’s always been true, but is just becoming evident to us. It’s the laughter of surrender.
The first time I thought to question whether I was, in fact, the boss of life, and that my expectations were what life “should” be delivering to me, I had the experience of feeling what I thought of as the solid ground under my feet, dissolving.
This happened a few years ago, around the time I was first learning the Three Principles. I didn’t like feeling there was no ground under my feet. It was completely disorienting. Looking back, I think the ground under my feet gave way because I was already starting to have an insight that gave me a new worldview, one that suggested, and continues to suggest, that it’s not life’s job to give me what I expect or think I should have; it’s my job to respond to what life puts in front of me.
I described the feeling of a worldview out of alignment with life as a shitty feeling. Now, I’ll describe the day-to-day experience of life I have now: I always feel I’m exactly where I should be, and what is happening is exactly what’s supposed to be happening. A simple way to say it is, I don’t resist life anymore. The result is, life no longer feels like it’s resisting me.
Does it feel like life is resisting you? If that’s the case, it may be time to take a long, patient look at where that resistance is really coming from. When you’re able to see that it may be your own thinking that’s generating that resistance, you’re halfway to a life where peace and well-being are part of your everyday experience.
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