Cristen Rodgers's Blog, page 23

Light & Shadow

What an amazing experience it is to be an active creator in life!  We come into this world with all of the tools necessary to mold and form ourselves and the world that we live in.   Everything is malleable, and we have power to shape it.  We have the physical resources that allow us to build, the mental resources that allow us to invent, and the energetic resources that allow us to consciously create.  We are overflowing with power in a world that seems ripe for change and life is a wonderful and sacred occasion to use that power.

In many regards, humanity has done well with its use of this power.  We have made ourselves healthier, happier, and gained the opportunity to be more compassionate and artistic.  We live longer, we have far more time for relaxation, and we have greater capabilities for creativity and ingenuity than ever before.

We have become accustomed to living in a world where difficulties are something to be overcome or fixed, and we have become expert at doing so.   While there is certainly nothing wrong with acknowledging and using our creative powers, we also need to appreciate the challenges of life.  When we get too focused on avoiding them, we inadvertently create more of what we are trying to avoid.  Thus they will continue to come at us until we accept them and allow them to give us what they are meant to.

We need struggle as much as we need comfort.  We need destruction as much as we need creation.   These things serve an important role.  Difficulties give us the inspiration and the resistance necessary to grow.  They also provide contrast.  Without darkness, could we see the light?  Without experiencing the cold, what is warmth?

When we are stringently focused upon the eradication of pain and suffering, we create for ourselves more pain and suffering.  These things exist because they need to.  Our best use of our power isn’t always in changing situations but in finding out how to use those situations; it is in discovering the purpose of strife and using that purpose to better ourselves.

Next time that  you come upon a struggle or a difficult situation, pause before you eagerly move forward and begin working to change or fix it.  Take a moment and ask what you can learn from this problem.  How has it given you the opportunity to grow?  Allow the shadow that it casts to remind you of how much light there is in your life.  Appreciate the difficulty for what it is and then move forward with your natural desire to change it.  That appreciation may prove to be the greatest factor in overcoming it, and it will also bring you a greater sense of gratitude and adoration for the richness of your experience.

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Beyond Roles

When someone asks you who you are, how do you answer?  How do you think of yourself?   If you’re like most people, you probably answer these questions with reference to the roles that you play.  You may be a student, a parent, a manager, or an artist.   These are all examples of roles; they are descriptive terms that represent a part of what you do, how or where you do it, and for what reasons.   They describe something about you but they are not who you are.

There is nothing inherently wrong with developing and using these roles.  They are necessary in this world of separate business, social, and familial obligations that all require different approaches.    Each role plays off of different personal strengths and drives to maximize your efficiency in different aspects of your life.  For the mother and business executive, the grandfather and nurse, or the brother and college student; the ability to categorize aspects of the self is invaluable.

It is important to remember; however, who we really are underneath the social roles that we inhabit.  The real person underneath defies generalizations and exceeds the capacity of any single character.   The spirit is pure potential, malleable and categorical.   This state of potential is where your true strength lies and it is the source of your creativity.

When you get lost in the roles that you play and forget this true nature, the results can be destructive.  To avoid becoming mentally and emotionally locked in place, you must remember who you really are.  Take time every day to gaze at your own reflection, to reacquaint yourself with the spirit beneath the roles that you slip in and out of.  If you do this regularly you will find that, whether your role is guardian, leader, pupil, or creator, you will fill it with greater enthusiasm, more creativity, and a sense of wholeness and satisfaction.

Recognize and get in touch with the spirit on the inside and you will be able to easily meet and exceed the responsibilities of your roles on the outside.

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Blessed by Blessing

Be what you want to see. Give what you want to get. Love as you want to be loved. These statements represent an important spiritual truth that can drastically change your life. This spiritual truth is that what you give you will inevitably also receive.

Although you cannot see it, you are sending and receiving millions of messages in every second of the day. These messages are in the form of energy. They originate in your thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Although what you think can’t be seen and what you feel may not always be known by others, the energy of those things can. Positive thoughts send out positive energy signals that everyone and everything around you absorbs.

Energy is attracted to its likeness. This is why people will naturally feel pulled towards or repelled from places, people, and situations. When you think uplifting thoughts and perpetuate positive emotions, you attract similar positive energy from those around you. When someone is incapable of matching the energy that you send out, you will find that they naturally fall away from you.

If you take the time every day to focus on sending out blessings to others, you are tailoring your energetic messages to positively influence the world around you. This influence then cycles around to bless you in much the same way, through the energetic responses of those you interact with. Put very simply, what you give you will begin to receive. This is true whether you consciously focus on it or not. For this reason, taking the time to send out blessings to others ensures that your energy is always working towards betterment and not unconsciously creating strife.

Every morning, set aside a few minutes to send out blessings to all of the people in your life. The most important people to bless are those for whom you hold negative feelings, for this is the energetic cycle that most needs to be rewritten. The more that you practice this, the more you will notice a shift in the way people react to you. Send love, understanding, comfort, and compassion. If you consistently do this, you will eventually find that you not only receive these things from others but that you actually become them. In becoming them, you are so full of positive energy that your influence spreads outward continuously, and even that influence will cycle back to you again. Bless yourself by first blessing others; this is the way to true fulfillment.

Motivation and Flow

There is a way to increase your success and magnify your productivity in your everyday activities.  And the way isn’t complicated; it is actually more natural than anything.  All it takes is turning your motivation inside out.  When you act from your will rather than some external influence, everything that you do is better, stronger, and more pleasurable.

If you can think about a time that you were doing something you were truly passionate about, you probably remember feeling almost as if time had stopped.   You were living right there in the moment, completely absorbed in what you were doing and content in doing it.  This state of content absorption and present-ness is called flow.  When you flow in what you are doing, the results are inspiring.  You are more creative, efficient, and satisfied in whatever it is that you are doing.

Flow doesn’t necessarily only happen when you are doing something that you are naturally passionate about.  The magic of flow is due to the source of your motivation.  So often, the motivation for our actions is external.  The paycheck, the social expectation, the punishment or reward all give us reason to act a certain way.  But the source of your energy, enthusiasm, creativity, and determination is born within you and moves outwards.  Thus, when the source of your motivation is outside of you, much of this greatness is never tapped into.

The secret to applying your greatest potential to your everyday life is to look within for the inspiration to do your daily duties and hold on to that inner drive.  When you start from the inside and move outwards, your full strength is gathered up inside and can then be expressed in what you are doing.  Most of the activities that you engage in can be examined in such a way that you will find a personally satisfying inspiration for it.  Those for which only an external motivation can be found might be the things that you can consider trying to change so they better reflect who you are inside.

When you begin your day, take a moment and think about the journey you are about to embark on.  Look within and find the real reasons for doing what you do and let that drive you.  You will surely find much greater enjoyment and might even end up doing everything just a little bit better.

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