When we are working with purpose, standing on the ground of our values, in balance and with healthy boundaries, we can take skilful action in the world, enabling us and those around us to flourish, whilst everything around us is as it has always been.
What competes with aliveness, what takes us away from our passion, purpose, values?
We call this the gloop that we are living in, the cultural norms. People refer to these as meta narratives, the ocean we are swimming in, the name doesn’t really matter, they are the big stories that shape our lives, are built into our muscle memory and how the world operates.
Performativity starts at a very early age – striving to do better, better against some form of measurement. Encouraging baby’s to smile, crawl, walk. It’s how most schooling operates with exams and grades. It continues at work, with titles, promotions, its all about benchmarking and improving. Layer onto this the world of social media loveliness, we are all striving for the perfect life.
We can get caught by suspending ourselves in the belief we can have what we want or take care of ourselves when….. I’ve got my grades, the university place, the promotion, the kids have left home, the bigger house, or ultimately retirement. The story keeps us going, but as soon as we get to where we said we would be alive, there’s another story. So we are unconsciously living, suspending for a future state – I’ll be happy when…. , not noticing what we have now.
In recent years mindfulness has become much more mainstream and helps the mind settle. The internal thoughts we have, I call mine the internal committee, have us judge ourselves and others and often takes us down the path of believing we are not good enough. The internal committee works in support of suspending and performativity and takes us away from being in the present moment.
All these stories take us away from being the truest version of ourselves, they are a habitual way of being, we are passengers in life not driving the car.
We may not be able to change the world around us, but if we all turn off the auto-pilot switch, swim in the ocean of life with a different level of consciousness who knows what the ripple effect might be.
