A video excerpt from the June 14th Sunday Zoom Group.

The questions that were asked were:
Are you always good with what life asks from you?
Do you still like the change or development?

Details of the Sunday Zoom Groups and other events can be found on the ‘events’ page.

The YouTube link to this video: https://youtu.be/tg6saIOIzTo

Transcript of Excerpt

I’m always sort of advocating and saying how important I feel acceptance is in life. That acceptance of what is. But what does that look like practically speaking, when life is sometimes asking something of you, as it invariably does. Asks you to drop something that’s not working anymore. Or step up to something that quite clearly your life is moving in that direction. And then you get things like resistance coming in and you get the mind kind of analyzing and going, “should I do this? Should I do that?” But this is the way life is moving and so that question sort of sparked this feeling of you know, it’s very well and good saying you should accept whatever is coming up in your life. But does that mean that you don’t have resistance? That you don’t have doubt? That you don’t have a sense of, “I don’t want this.” Does it mean I have those things?

You know, people assume that awakening means you don’t. You don’t deal with these issues anymore, you don’t question life. You just have this deep acceptance. And yes, while that is very true, it doesn’t mean on a practical relative surface level, that you don’t come up against those things. That I don’t come up against those things, I do. I do struggle with life sometimes where I see the inevitability of something, and yet there’s something still in me that is like, “boy, this feels uncomfortable.” Or, “I didn’t imagine this for myself.” And then there’s a sense of maybe grief that comes up, or sense of resistance or struggle with that. Now, it’s all held in this bigger space of acceptance. Even the resistance, even the doubt, even the railing against life. Is still all held in that love, in that acceptance, in that compassion for life. But yeah, do I still struggle with these things? Of course.

Sometimes life is asking something of you that feels too much. That feels like the small human brain can’t comprehend where this step leads to the next step to leads to the next step. And all it can see is this doesn’t make sense. In all this it feels… it’s not just about the mind, it’s about the body, is the body ready?

So yeah, I very much do. And I think people assume that if they’re… and this is why I’m bringing this up, because they assume that if they’re going through a struggle, that they’re the only ones that possibly could be going through that. And if they’re going through that struggle or they’re going through that resistance or whatever it is, that they’re going through, that makes them “unenlightened”, that makes them, “not conscious” and not doing the work and all of these sort of ideas and these projections that if I’m experiencing this, it means… it could even go as far as to say it means I’m a lost cause. I’ve had people come to me and say “I’m a lost cause because I experienced this” and, and I say “No, see that there’s a bigger acceptance in this picture. See that there’s a bigger place of compassion and acceptance and love that has room for even all of this stuff, this very sort of human experiences. To not assume that you’ve somehow got to wipe the slate clean in order to recognize your own nature. All of this stuff happens within that.”

As for the second part of the question, Do I still like change or development? Like?! Oi!

Again, it’s both. Do I like it? Sometimes it’s not comfortable. So no, in those moments sometimes I really don’t. But there’s a bigger picture. And this is where I say both, and because there’s always a bigger picture. Yes, there’s acceptance and there’s acknowledgement of those individual fluctuations in life, let’s call them. Change is inevitable. You can’t escape change. Does it stop with awakening? No, not at all. I used to think it would actually. I had this grand vision that, you know, awakening would be like, “that’s it, we’re done.” And I actually found the opposite.

Change and growth are inevitable and actually the brakes come off because the strategy to avoid that change, it dissolves, it disintegrates, it doesn’t hold up. But it doesn’t mean I’m always totally on board with it. On a deeper level, absolutely. But on the surface level, does frustration come up? Yeah. Because life asks of us sometimes things which feel impossible. Asks us to let go of something which feels very dear to us. Our sense of who we are. Our image of ourselves. The sense that we’re in control. Many things, there’s many things.

So even if those things are coming up in you, or any number of other things are coming up in you, it’s okay. Can you even accept that? Can you fold even those things into that level of acceptance and that recognition of life being as life is. To not have expectations of life is a really difficult one. To be in life, with life, in communion with life rather than having ideas of what life should or shouldn’t be.

We’re not in control of what life calls of us. Even this idea of you can avoid something. Life has sort of got an inevitability about it. It’s in the mail. Even if we think we’re successfully shoving something under the carpet there’s an inevitability about it. That at some point life will cycle background and ask that of us. To see that. To integrate that. To accept that.