Sometimes life is about pushing more, sometimes it's about pushing less

My friend Chris once said life is the yin and the yang. I saw it. A dance between the active and the passive; between being the guide and the guided; between being the mover and the moved.

It seems to me our passage through life is a dance between doing and allowing. Sometimes it's time to do more. You're not going to build that business or write that book from the couch. Sometimes, though, it's time to allow more—to stop pushing against the resistance and allow life to guide you, rather than you guide it.

Peaceful wisdom knows exactly when to do each.

Fragile ego chooses poorly.

As a tip, I can only say this, though I've found it a profound guide in my life:

When we feel spiritual and emotional wellness—smoothness, like we're dancing in time with life, carry on.

When we feel spiritual and emotional illness—resistance, like we're dancing out of time with life, stop and take a moment. It may be a signal that it's time to change between doing more and allowing more.

It can go both ways. If we're being too passive, that feeling can be a call to get more active. If we're being too active, that feeling can be a call to get more passive.

Like I said, peaceful wisdom knows. The ego gets it wrong. If the ego is telling us we need to push more, we probably need to push less. If the ego is telling us we need to push less, we probably need to push more. Stopping and taking a moment is what allows wisdom to speak. It knows.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Life is simpler than we think

Why letting go of resistance is generally better than pushing through it

Life is simpler than we think. We are the ones who make it complicated.

More often than not, when someone tells me how something is hard, what they're really telling me is how they are making it harder than it needs to be. Unintentionally, of course. I don't mean to imply that people deliberately make things hard for themselves. We just fail to see, sometimes, that we're the ones bringing the complexity.

Often, all we need to do is let go rather than push harder against ourselves.

The gazillions of self-help articles in magazines and on-line don't help. I can show you many elaborate and contradictory plans from magazines and blogs for overcoming procrastination. However, I've never seen anything that works better than simply taking the smallest possible step and seeing if the second step follows. It mostly does. It's just that the first step gets thought into something much bigger and harder than it is.

Very often we fight to make ourselves do what we think we should. Only because we don't listen to the simple truth that actually we neither want to, nor do we actually need to.

That's not to say we don't necessarily need a little help to get ourselves to the gym, but changing direction from the path to the sofa to the path to the gym doesn't have to need an intervention of biblical proportions.

See the truth. Seek the simple path.

If it feels like you're having to wage war against the hardness, you're probably going in the wrong direction. And when you realise you are the one putting up both the army for doing something and the army for resisting it, letting go makes even more sense.

I recognise we can't always see what the truth is or what the simple path is and that's why conversation can be powerful.

The truth and simplicity is there to be seen, nevertheless.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.