Hi Lazy :) I am struggling at the moment with finding purpose in the world. I want to do something that I am passionate about and that creates positivity, but sometimes I feel that I am incapable of sustaining success for any length of time. I often start things but don't see them through because it doesn't feel 'right'. I also struggle with procrastination. This has eroded my confidence in myself to succeed at fulfilling my goals. Do you have any thoughts/advice on this? Namaste, take care :)
Use your feelings to decide what feels right to begin but use your intelligence to see those projects through to their end. Our feelings can be great sources of inspiration but they are also very changeful. They are not reliable as the sole source of motivation for executing those inspired ideas.
Starting a meditation practice, for example, can be exciting at first. There are all these new feelings of peace and happiness. Then after a few weeks or months, meditation can feel boring, hateful, emotional, or unpleasant. Many people quit at that point. However, that is the most crucial time to continue and in doing so move beyond the limiting aspects of the ego. Those who stick with it discover a new depth to those first initial experiences of peace and joy.
Any new activity yields diminishing returns over time. That is why feeling “right” is not enough. You might be enthusiastic about working out and leading a healthier lifestyle this year. But the trudge to the gym can become more of a hassle than that excitement. It isn’t until you persevere and experience your body growing stronger that you can truly appreciate your decision beyond the mere enjoyment around the idea of working out.
The same tendency to need that feeling of “rightness” is also what causes procrastination. The time just doesn’t feel right to do this or that. The trick isn’t making it feel right. The trick is to stop asking yourself whether or not you feel like doing something once you’ve decided that you are going to do it. Then you just do it.
Coming back to the meditation example, once you have decided daily meditation is what you want to do, then that’s that. Sit down every day to meditate whether you feel like it or not.
The only resistance you feel is the resistance you create. Notice your forms of resistance as they arise and cease to take their advice.
Namaste :)
Hi lazyyogi, i have a problem and i hope that you could give me some advise.. i am very insecure. I compare myself to other people all the time, i know i shouldn't.. but how can i stop this? It's very disturbing in my relationship too. Much love.
People are like spheres and what we “see” of them are like circles. We see only a small slice, which is incapable of capturing their full dimension.
When you compare yourself to others, first you are reducing your understanding of yourself to a circle. Then you are weighing that circle in relation to other circles.
What you wind up with isn’t any legitimate insight into yourself or other people but rather an entire distortion regarding your sense of reality.
You say you “know” not to compare yourself to others but that knowledge is not your knowledge, not yet. You must make it your own. Why shouldn’t you compare yourself? Examine how this habit of comparison has benefitted you. Has it ended your insecurity? Has it helped you to know who you truly are? Has it strengthened your relationship with others? My guess is no, it hasn’t.
Once you realize that you are holding onto something that is burning into your flesh, it’s not hard to drop it. But you must be very aware in order to notice this every time it starts to happen, because unlike holding a burning coal in your hand, delusive habits can be rather subtle and fly under the radar of conscious attention.
At the same time, this urge to compare yourself to others is simply the misplaced urged to know yourself. Because you think of yourself as someone who is comparable to others, reducible to qualities on a checklist, you go about trying to secure/understand/orient yourself in that context.
Instead, turn your attention inward toward your very sense of existence. Explore aliveness without any external frame of reference. Find out what you actually are. Daily meditation is a significant beneficial influence on this journey.
To lend more depth and context to what has been said here, I’d also highly recommend the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
Namaste sis :) Much love
Hey! I was just wondering how I can detach myself from someone? I'm so attached it's really irritating and I don't wanna be.
Detaching from anything, be that a person, object, or circumstance, means coming back to yourself.
Attachment isn’t a real experience; it is a product of confusion. Generally it means someone has knowingly or unknowingly assumed something to be permanent that by nature cannot be so. You aren’t physically bound to this person. Yet the experience of attachment is an occurrence in the mind. It has to do with the mind’s thoughts and the body’s reaction to those thoughts. Or, conversely, the body’s emotions and the mind’s reaction/interpretation regarding those emotions.
When attachment is a force in our life it is because we have begun to use temporary phenomena as a way to orient and understand who we are and where our happiness resides. It is an indication that we have misattributed some sense of who we are and the joy of that Being to something derivative and external. When that phenomenon’s role in our life changes due to the impermanent nature of this shifting world, it can provoke confusion within us that results in suffering.
Most people “fix” this by going from one attachment to another. Perhaps finding a new boyfriend, pursuing sensory gratification in myriad forms, or fixating on worldly achievement. They play out the same old pattern of delusion but in different ways yet expect a different result. I suspect this is why so many of our elders make us sad rather than inspire hope and wisdom—their lives end more with regret than with transformation, peace, and insight.
To discover real peace means loosening this tendency to grasp at the world for happiness and identity, instead turning within to uncover the real meaning of your aliveness when we talk about “life.”
Daily meditation is an essential part of altering your way of living such that you aren’t so much trying to fill some hole within you but rather are allowing something to come through you into this world. Instead of trying to get happiness from life, you bring happiness to life. When your way of life becomes an opportunity to express and share the peace and happiness you are finding within, everything changes. There is less fear, more love. Less attachment, more freedom. Less confusion, more peace.
On a more immediate level, try this:
- Notice the primary form your attachment takes. It could be thoughts, emotions, or both.
- When that attachment begins to express itself, shift your focus from the story you have built in your mind to the feeling of being in your body.
- This feeling of inhabiting the body includes both the sensations in the body but also the space in which those sensations occur.
- For example, when you feel your hand from the inside out, there is the sensation of the energy-consciousness in your hand but there is the internal spaceless space of awareness in which that sensation presents itself.
- By abiding with your attention filling your body in this way, you avoid getting swept up in mental loops of the thoughts that once acted to renew your feelings of pain.
- At the same time, it allows the feelings of pain to be there and to be fully experienced without being overcome or swept away by them.
- Make this practice persistent so long as you are suffering from the experience of attachment, or really any form of mental anguish. It always subsides into peace, sooner or later.
Lastly, a book I would highly recommend is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
Namaste :) Much love
Sometimes I think about how many people I met in food service who smoke. I think about growing up in an upper-middle class neighborhood, and how it was drilled into me that smoking is addictive and bad for your health. I think most people, in America at least, are well aware of that. Whenever I would decline a cigarette, on the rare occasion it was offered, saying I dont smoke the reply is always "good, don't start."
I think about the long shifts, working on your feet all day, with breaks scheduled down to the minute. Every second of your day controlled by the clock, regardless of how tired you might be. However, in food service, there is one exception. The smoke break. Most managers respect the smoke break. The old school ones do, at least. The newer crop less so. Food service is fast paced, highly stressful work, and nicotine, in addition to all of its addictive and damaging properties, is a relaxant. If a burger flipper or barista says they need to step outside for a smoke, you let them do it, and you dont begrudge them for it.
It's such a strange bit of kindness. One that we know is terribly harmful in many respects, but performed anyway. I think about all of the interconnected systems, of health, of education, of exploitation, that leads a person to knowingly trade in years of their life for five minutes of peace. I wonder how many people in my upper middle class neighborhood would propose simply banning the smoke breaks. I wonder how many people I know would just break.
Forget about your life situation and pay attention to your life. Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now. Your life situation is mind-stuff. Your life is real.
Eckhart Tolle
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly.
Eckhart Tolle