If you’ve ever tried swimming against the current, you know how exhausting it is. The harder you try, the more exhausted you get. The more you resist the current, the more desperate and alone you feel. But if you drop your resistance and give yourself over to it, it takes you with it, and you need not expend any energy at all. Your journey goes from agonizing to effortless.
There is no better metaphor for life. You’re either swimming with or against the current. You either resist life by judging, or you let it guide you. If that sounds like a leap of faith, it is. But only to your judging habit. It wants to know and control every outcome.
But you are not meant to judge yourself. The tree or bird or rock doesn’t doubt for a second who it is and what it is meant to do. Storms and rough patches may need to be weathered along the way. But they are part of the experience of unfiltered reality. As long as you’re connected to life, you are not lost to life.
But your judging habit keeps taking you out of the unfiltered reality in front of you, and into the filtered one in your head. It keeps disconnecting you from your body, pulling you into your head, leaving you doubting your identity and purpose. Your judging makes you think you have a million choices, to be this person or that person, to have this goal or that goal. So many people you could be! So much choice! Yet, deep down you just want to be you. Just like the tree or bird or rock, you want to be who you are designed to be.
There is only one you. You are already it. You’re never anyone else. You don’t need to go searching for yourself in all the things you judge. Those things cannot show you who you are. You think if you like something, you can find yourself in it. That’s why you want to acquire it, and more like it. You attach your happiness to your circumstances. As long as circumstances don’t change, you’re happy.
But circumstances always change, and when they do, it shakes you up. You fear change because your happiness depends on things staying the same. But resisting change is resisting life. The more you resist, the more you swim against the current. You are disoriented and lost. Resisting makes you feel like it’s you against the world.
Unlike the tree, the bird and the rock, you have been given a choice. But if you want to be you, choice is a distraction, an illusion. When you are living in an unfiltered reality, you know exactly what action to take. You’re in its powers. It’s a guiding force. If you listen and experience the reality in front of you, your only choice is to be you.
Your natural state is to be free of judgment. Living any other way means hardship and suffering. Resist your habit of judging everything life puts in front of you. Instead, you simply experience what’s in front of you. The joy of experiencing doesn’t depend on outcomes. The joy of experiencing is joy within itself. Joy is your natural state.
How natural are you?
