The Destination You Never Left
I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths where your life wells forth.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
Do you ever find yourself not content or happy with the way things are in your world? Are there things you see and experience as “problems” that you wish were different or just gone?
It’s likely that if you’ve experienced this (which, I think we all have) it’s driven you to set goals, take actions and/or create plans on how to change your circumstances.
Nothing wrong with that.
The only pickle we may find ourselves in, which by all estimations is a pretty big pickle, is what happens when we finally achieve our goals, achieve the changes we wanted, but arrive at our desired destination with the same kind of eyes, the same kind of thinking that created our initial discontent, the initial “problem”.
I call this experience “The Great Disillusionment.”
And I always warn my clients about it, especially the ones that are super convinced that if they got the new house, or got more clients, or got the 6-figure business, THEN they’ll be happy, content, and fulfilled.
I’ve experienced it. And my clients who HAVE achieved exactly what they wanted, have experienced it too.
The reason we get disillusioned is because we find out that we don’t really feel that different. The setting has changed. But underlying all of it, we still feel inadequate. We still feel lacking. We’re still fearful. We still feel like something deep is missing.
The truth is, as long as we continue to operate from the misunderstanding that our feelings are somehow connected to our circumstances, we’ll keep hitting what feel like “dead ends,” and not experience the fulfillment we are seeking.
The mystics, sages and wise-ones throughout the ages have all echoed the same thing: What you’re looking for can only be found deep within your own consciousness.
And to steer us in the right direction, we must come to a deeper understanding, and more importantly, a deeper realization that we can only ever feel our thinking in the moment and not something other than our thinking.
As our point of view changes, our feelings change with it.
As our point of view changes, our feelings change with it. Click To Tweet
In other words, your felt experience in the moment isn’t informing you about the state of the world or your circumstances. Your felt experience in the moment is only informing you about your current point of view (and nothing else).
If you’re not feeling a sense of well-being and peace in this moment, it’s because you’re probably seeing the world from a certain point of view that is naturally causing you to be in a low mood.
But what would happen if you stopped assigning so much importance or meaning to your current thought?
What would happen if you realized, in this moment, “Holy shit! I’m not feeling what’s happening, I’m feeling my thoughts ABOUT what’s happening”?
And what would happen if instead of trying to modify, change or improve your thinking, you simply dropped it (which is akin to “do nothing about it”)?
Here’s what would most likely happen:
The thought, by design, will pass like a cloud in the sky of your awareness. And if you stay present, open and paying attention, you’ll likely start feeling into your Innate Wellbeing (your natural state).
And you’ll feel good. Really good.
Because your natural state is sweet. It’s blissful. It’s Life.
And from this place, instead of your creativity being used to fill the imaginary lacks you’ve created via your thinking… your creativity becomes an expression of love, of abundance and joy.
Then life stops being about getting to a destination in the future that holds the promise of a better “now.”…and it dawns on you that the destination you’ve been trying to arrive at, in all the wrong ways, is actually the destination you never left.