One of the benefits of being unemployed is finally having the time to become acquainted with who you really are… your True Essence without the mask of the role of the job you perform. We have become a society in which we avoid looking within to see who we really are. We have seemingly perfected the art of distraction. Where there was once a place in our heart as young children where we lived in wonderment and a sense of connection to everything and everyone, we now live in a perpetual state of distraction with the advent of technology such as computers, the internet, television, movies, video games, and telephones. Rarely does anyone ever sit in stillness. When we do stop for a rest, we seem to have to be constantly entertained or numbed to our emotions. There seems to be no room for introspection, bird songs, nature, and being still enough to get in touch with one’s own true essence.
We spend the first half of our life looking into our outer space and forgetting about our inner space. Then we spend the second half of our life trying to find life’s deeper meaning and eventually look into our inner space to find out who we really are. How do we reach the turning point and decide to begin to look within? Often it takes a crisis in our life to cause our attachments to be abruptly wrenched from our grasp and strip our ego and force us to look within. For others, the quest begins with a sense of emptiness and lack of fulfillment, even when we believe that we have achieved all of our goals as set forth by us or by the standards of our society.
When we have lost touch with our true essence, we are not fully present in our daily lives. Think back to yesterday. Where was your attention? What did you focus on? Was it on problems and duties? Were you fully present or were you focused on the past and/or the future? Recall yesterday. Did you feel peaceful? Calm? Centered? Did you have a sense of clarity? Did you feel a sense of power without a need to be in control? How much time did you spend in your thoughts? How much time did you spend in your feelings? How much time did you spend in your heart? Did you flow through your day with a sense that you were empowered and that you empowered others?
The point of all these questions is that, if you did not experience your day from a standpoint of empowerment and joy, you likely were not fully present and in the moment at that time. You were not in touch with your true essence. You were being all too human, struggling between thoughts and emotions, ideas and feelings, failure and success; you were essentially caught up in some aspect of ego. The problem with living life from the standpoint of our ego is that there is never any resolution, never enough, only more struggle. That place from which our peace and power and joy come from is called our true self or true essence. That is the self that we have to invoke, call in, touch, understand and become reacquainted with so that we can let that all-knowing part of us flow into the lives that we have created.
With unemployment or a job break for the summer we finally have the time to meditate and go within to become more aware of who we truly are…. and then to begin to create the life we choose to live with intention.
We are powerful in our choices… what will you choose to create next? 🙂
The Shift Doctors (Tracy Latz, M.D. & Marion Ross, Ph.D.)
*Check out The Shift Doctors’ books at the Amazon link by clicking here and the Meditation CDs at the digstation link by clicking here
