We Can Spare You

It’s nothing new. Perhaps it’s happening more frequently now. Now that so many of the systems we’ve lived within for so long seem to be crumbling. A man or woman wakes up in their bed one day and realises, ‘This is not the life I want. This life does not feel authentic. I’ve achieved so much in the outer world and I feel like a parched desert on the inside. I’ve been going so fast, trying to keep up with everything, and for what? I don’t know who I am!’

And so begins the inner journey. A journey of undoing, of unlearning, of stripping away. A journey of searching for the authentic self. A journey of discovering one’s true gifts and how they would most like to be expressed in the world. A journey towards congruence of the inner and outer lives. A challenging journey. A risky journey. A courageous journey. A journey that takes us into the dark and into the light. A journey where no stone can be left unturned.

For some time, and it could be many years, we straddle the worlds. The old world we came from and the new world we’re moving towards. We know the old world doesn’t fit, isn’t right and something deep within us knows that we’re moving towards something truer. But we can be very vulnerable and susceptible at this time. There are lots of people in our lives who haven’t had their own morning of waking up in their bed. Not yet. And so as we’re courageously moving through our journey they ask us, ‘Yes, but what are you going to do?’

And the truth is, we don’t know yet what we’re going to do. We have no idea. We just know that life has to change. We have to live something more real. We have to be true to ourselves. We have to honour our hearts. But the shape and form that will take? We just don’t know. It takes time.

Because of the way our society is, we’re made to feel it’s not ok to take time. We’re made to feel that we should always be doing. We should always be involved with doing something. We’re made to feel that if we stop doing then something is very, very wrong. We’re made to feel that we should have figured it out yesterday. The most important thing in our society is to be producing something, creating something, doing something, achieving something.

To all those people currently on the courageous path of non-doing, of taking time, of listening to and exploring one’s inner world I want to say this:

The world can spare you for a while! We are nearly 8 billion people on this planet. There is plenty of doing going on and a huge amount of that doing is destructive. When you stop and take time out to explore and reassess you are not being lazy or selfish. We will all be so much better off when you come back with the fruits of your journey because the fruits of such an inner journey are inevitably more authenticity, more love, more peace, more compassion, more understanding.

Just because our society has such a strong addiction to doing doesn’t mean it’s right. Trust your journey. Trust that your non-doing now will bring gifts for us all later on. Our society needs a radical shift away from this insistence of continuous doing. You are part of this shift. So be courageous. You’re helping pave the way for a different world.

Love and courage,

Leah