By Dr. Marta Adelsman
Life Coach in Communication and Consciousness
www.DrMartaCoach.com
(November 1, 2017)
When I first sat down to write this, I tried to describe the various psychic and emotional weights – attached to the ankles of our career, relationships, personal/emotional growth and spiritual realization – that keep us stuck. In an effort to identify hindrances and what prevents us from hearing our inner guidance, I ran into my own hindrance in the form of writer’s block.
Then I had a huge aha! Only one psychic/emotional weight hinders us: attaching ourselves to the thought that we need to get someplace where we’re not. According to Byron Katie (A Thousand Names for Joy, Loving What Is):
Thinking we should be someplace (or someone or something) that we’re not is the definition of suffering.
If, instead of fairly consistent joy, we experience the weight of guilt, shame, confusion and fear because we’re not “moving forward” in life, we can see that weight as an invitation. It beckons us to look from a higher perspective, to notice what wraps around our experience of “stuckness:” a ribbon and a big bow with a tag that says, “Gifts of Grace inside.”
When I look from my higher Wisdom at my own lack of forward progress, I see how I put pressure on myself to know, do or be something about which I haven’t yet received inner guidance. To be honest, if I fumble around not knowing what the heck to do next, I feel like a failure. Within that mess, here’s the gift:
It’s okay to live in I-Don’t-Know.
Though it can feel uncomfortable and scary, I-Don’t-Know often presents itself – often in hindsight – as a creative, fertile space of cultivating and incubating and resting. Waiting can be very productive in a quiet sort of way, and we get to choose whether to fight it or to welcome it.
As we welcome it, one day the inner landscape shifts and we see clearly. Ah! There’s the path I’m to follow! Maybe we even hum a few bars of the song, “I Can See Clearly Now.” We feel lighter. “It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sun-shiny day!” And if it doesn’t appear so, I can still be bright and sun-shiny, because I know and love whatever shows up!