From Pushing to Flowing

The Union Path Podcast - From Pushing to Flowing
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Pushing can be a really funny habit, especially when we're young. We can learn some lessons that may not actually be entirely true.

They may not even be a little bit true. And one of those, at least in my experience, revolves around the effectiveness of pushing.

Revolves around the effectiveness of will. This idea that, there are these things I want, and I'm going to make them happen,

through my own force, through my own persistence, through my own will to make it happen. And the funny thing is, at least, in a lot of small ways, this does tend to work.

We truly can make things happen. We truly can force an outcome, force a result, especially in the short term, of what we're trying to create.

Control does work, at least in the short term, or at least often enough to create the illusion that it's a much better, much smarter, much more effective, much more efficient strategy, than it really is.

But the thing about pushing the thing about "making things happen", is it really gets wound up and a whole bunch of emotion.

It really seems to spring out of a sense of want, longing. Really strong, can feel like a magnetic attraction to a certain outcome, but with a really particular and peculiar tenor to it.

It doesn't feel so much like delight, it feels more like scratching an itch. It feels more like the cessation of discomfort.

And when desires don't have this light quality, when they have a bit of a darker quality, or a heavier quality is how I like to think about it,

I think those are the things where it's really important to bear witness, really important to look at the the things we want, and really question, why do I want this?

Really question, how am I wanting this? What's the energy around this desire? How sticky does this feel?

Is this something that I feel pretty light and loose about? Or is this something I really feel stuck in? Like this absolutely needs to happen. I've invested a lot of myself, a lot of my identity a lot of my, expectation for living the life I want in the fulfillment of this desire.

So when these stickier, heavier desires come around, and we do find the awareness and the courage to actually look at them,

I think they're pretty instructive, I think we can learn a lot about ourselves, when we look at what we want, how we want, why we want.

Personally, I find myself pushing when there's something that I really want, but that want is grounded in a place of lack,

and usually that place of lack has been established over a fairly long time. There's been some missing piece, some missing element,

it's kind of like your eating a dish and it's just clear there's something missing, there's some spice, some absence that this all feels incomplete.

And the mind gets lost and trying to solve for the deficit, rather than appreciating the experience. Things get defined by what they lack rather than what they are and what they contain.

So when I find myself really dipping down into willpower, really dipping down into force, really dipping into making things happen,

the awareness when I do spot it, which tends to happen a little faster every time I do it, the awareness that happens is, undergirding the whole thing, is fear.

The thing that's driving me is fear. The thing creating this energy is fear, but the problem is fear is a really dirty fuel.

It's hard to run terribly clean in life when it's fear that's fueling us. But that doesn't invalidate the desire, that doesn't mean that what we want is wrong.

If we've been lacking something fundamental in our lives, even if fear is motivating us, that doesn't mean that lack isn't real,

that doesn't mean that lack shouldn't be rectified, or at least reconciled, through greater understanding.

The problem is, the energy that we choose to flow with will, absolutely, color the outcome and the experience that we have. There's no way around it.

We get out of things the energy we put into them. Outcomes are mirrors of intents. It's when I find myself really pushing for something that I want, there's a couple step process that I find myself coaching myself through.

And obviously this starts with awareness, I can't do anything about something I'm not aware of. But at the same time, I can't really look at something if I'm overcome with thoughts and feelings about that awareness.

I think that's the whole thing, I notice I feel bad, it doesn't really do me a lot of favors to then feel bad about feeling bad.

That actually makes it harder to look, that that actually obfuscates both the size and shape of my feelings, and also the meaning that's embedded, and why I'm feeling these things in the first place.

Because I think, especially at mid age, it's easy to look at habits and not only feel bad for doing the thing, but feeling bad for doing the thing for so long.

That when we've decided something no longer serves us, it's really easy to then look back at our lives and look at all the ways in which this habit has let us down and feel bad about it.

Feel depleted from it, feel a sense of remorse and maybe some grief. But the very least, maybe a little bit of frustration with ourselves.

We've done this thing for so long, and seemingly, we've been stealing food off our own plate. So that's thing one, the awareness. And then we need to move into another step, which is actually where the good stuff comes from.

It's really sitting with our behavior, sitting with our motivations, our thoughts and feelings and actions around, why we do what we do, and what tends to happen, when we do that.

And so when I find myself pushing, it's a familiar habit, done it a million times, I'll probably do it a million more, but the perfection isn't the key, that's not what I'm looking for, I'm not looking for an A+,

I'm not looking for a purity in my own behaviors and responses, I'm looking to grow, looking to learn, I'm looking to see things as they actually are, and move forward from that place,

I'm looking for truth. And so when I find myself pushing, and I examine what's behind it, I usually do find fear. And then I find feelings underneath that fear.

Feelings that have been imprinted from past events. And this fear really seems like a benevolent energy. This fear is creating a firewall, it's creating a barrier, and telling me, danger.

It's saying, you're encountering something that in the past has led to pain, it's a warning. There's a problem with taking these warnings too literally,

there's a problem with taking these warnings as is a statement of fact, rather than, of correlation. It's important to listen when fear comes up, because it is illuminating something real.

It is telling us something very important and meaningful about ourselves. It's really important to listen to. That's where self-awareness comes from, it's through listening, through processing,

through having the courage to actually bear witness to ourselves and hear what our experience is actually telling us, and then integrate that into the future.

And so when I find myself pushing really hard to create a certain outcome to get something done, I have to remember pretty fundamental truth, that when I spot fear as my fuel, as my navigator,

I have to remember, the fear can't be ultimately trusted, at least not literally. I believe fear needs to be interpreted, it comes to us as an incomplete message, it has an encoding to it, that we can follow to better understand ourselves.

Better understand our own needs, better understand really at a base level who and what we are and what matters to us. Because ultimately, if taken literally, fear is an unreliable narrator.

We can't just take it literally, we really have to sit with it, we really have to work with it, and that's its power. It's not just the feeling. It's a far deeper meaning, it's a far deeper learning that can come from interpreting the feeling, and show us a lot of things about ourselves,

a lot of things we may not necessarily like about ourselves, but it's honest. We can trust it, perhaps not literally, but we can trust that when the feeling of fear comes over us it's communicating to us something real,

something real, that by sitting with it, by interpreting it, we can really learn something, we can really grow. So when I find myself pushing, usually through fear, the thing I almost immediately remember is that this isn't actually what I want.

I don't actually want to live my life through fear. I don't really want to use that as my fuel. I really want to come from a different place, I really want to live in a different way.

I don't want to act out of fear, because when I do, it simply perpetuates the fear. And it perpetuates if a couple of pernicious ways.

The first is, it validates itself, that when I'm acting out of fear, and I achieve what I aim to achieve, well that worked, and the more often something works, obviously, the more often I'm going to do it.

So it sets me up again, it builds these habits, it sets up these cycles, feeling fear, jumping into action, to basically rub it out.

And my life becomes, or at the very least a lot of my action becomes focused on removing this uncomfortable feeling of fear,

doing whatever I can to assuage these voices in my head, these feelings that are uncomfortable. And usually it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of energy. Fear is not efficient, it's very effortful to do things out of fear.

Because we're only using a part of ourselves. We're only using the part of ourselves that's afraid. We've diminished and buried the part of ourselves, the larger part of ourselves that actually knows there's nothing really to be afraid of, ultimately.

It's not that these feelings aren't real, but these feelings aren't factually accurate. These feelings are a symbol, they're not a thing in and of itself.

And then the second thing, through following and engaging and giving fear control of our lives, is we never really get to experience the thing we're afraid of,

instead we end up living these lives guided by assumption and hearsay. We never really get to go through the thing we're so scared of. And of course I'm not talking about intentionally leaping into absolutely horrendous situations, but I am talking about, the wisdom of exposure.

Because we've all experienced it, right? We've always had something we're extremely afraid of happening, and then it happens. What then?

I would say the most common outcome, if not almost completely universal outcome, is that, you know, I feel like my fears kind of made a bit of a mountain out of a molehill here.

Yeah, when I went through that, that wasn't pleasant, a lot of it was probably pretty miserable, I'm not scared of things that don't exist, these things actually are real, it wasn't just all made up,

but the severity, I didn't really get the severity part right. This was way bigger in my mind than it actually is in real life. I'd really underestimated my resilience and my ability to engage and encounter challenges as they came up,

but also I'd also really overestimated my own accuracy in predicting what's going to happen. And that's a universal thing, right? I would say, as human beings we're actually pretty rotten at predicting the future, it's kind of funny we listen to each other so much.

So much of our media, so much of our news so many things we pay attention to, it's really attempts at trying to predict the future.

So a little of it is what actually happened, so little of it is awareness on the present moment, so much of it is, well, what's gonna happen next?

How do we insulate ourselves? How do we make some moves that prevent whatever event has happened from happening to us? Or how do we steer away from whatever calamity we see rushing towards us?

But when we act from that place entirely, I think we missed the boat a little bit, because there really is a value, there really is a lot of good that can come from experiencing precisely that they we're afraid of.

Because that's truth, that's reality. That's something we can actually integrate and live from and build into the basis of our being. That can be much more of a truthful and reliable guide.

Experience is the ultimate reality, and obviously that reality is colored by perception and interpretation, there it is.

It's difficult to Talk us out of things we've actually experienced. But it's pretty easy to talk us into or out of things we haven't. We're very impressionable, especially when fear is involved.

But when we're pushing to create a certain outcome or there's something we really, really want, we feel this has been missing from our lives for so long, and we're, we're afraid.

We're not only afraid of having this thing never happen, we're afraid of being stuck in this lack forever. That's really hard, and honestly That's really good to know about ourselves.

It's really good to know. There are things that we want, that there are unmet needs, that there is more that we want out of life, because, obviously, that's what beckons us forward.

If we felt complete in every possible way, well that would make life pretty superficial. If there's nothing we wanted, if there's nothing we're really engaged with,

if everything was simply sense perception, there's not really much to that, is there? So by going through the events in life that we are most afraid of,

in learning that, usually, those fears are far worse than our head than they really are to experience,

and that because we've avoided events that have this outcome as a possibility, we've really made our lives a lot smaller.

We do the same thing through pushing. We do the same thing when we lock into trying to create one certain outcome in one particular way.

We miss all the other outcomes, of all the other ways. We get tunnel vision, that there's only one way to feel the way we want.

Obviously that isn't true. We get tunnel vision that our fears are literally correct, and we can never really step through them, we can never really step past them,

because we're so reluctant to engage with them. We eliminate our lives down to a very few set of options, and obviously, that's not a good thing either.

So when we have identified something we're pushing towards, when we've identified there might be lack in our life, identified fear might be active, what do we do?

I think one of the worst things we can do is to stop trying. Is say, oh, that was just fear. That was just, coming from a place that isn't really real.

Well, was it? Or is the fear masking something else underneath? Is the fear bringing to life, bringing to light, deficits in our lives that are real?

That really would be better to correct? And if that's the case, how do we find a way of meeting these needs? How do we find a way of experiencing these outcomes that doesn't feel so bad,

that we can actually engage our whole selves in rather than really only engage fractionally? Like a lot of great questions on, what should we do with our lives, the very unsatisfying answer is that, well, it's up to us.

There's several core beliefs about life that I have. That have just been reinforced too many times for me not to completely acknowledge as truth,

or at the very least, the closest thing to truth I've experienced, and one are these things is, fundamental to human life, is free will. Free will undergirds everything.

With everything, there's a choice, and maybe those choices are more limited than we'd like, maybe, choice doesn't involve movement, it doesn't involve being able to change anything in our physical reality,

but it does extend deeper. There's always choice, on what we think. There's always choice on what we believe. There's always choice on what we engage as the animating energy of our lives.

Anything in our lives, anything coloring the experience of our lives, ultimately we're the ones with agency over it. And so we get to choose what energy we act from.

We get to choose what we cultivate, and we get to choose what we cull. We are the ones growing the experience of our own lives. And we are the ones, who get to choose, ultimately, the color and tenor that our lives present.

And so if we're pushing towards a specific outcome, we can appreciate, you know, this is really, something I really want.

Or conversely, if we find we're only acting out of fear and we don't actually want to do these things at all, we can appreciate the fear for illuminating that too.

This is only possible because we dare to look underneath, look what the fear was hiding, to see what's really there.

Was it just the fear or was there something more? And if there's something more, if there's something really important, now we can engage with those desires, now we can meet ourselves on a deeper level,

than simply at the level of our own reactions to perceived outcomes. We can I actually live at the place of our own energy, of our own guidance. And move forward through life from that place.

And we can dare, when we're pushing, when we've gotten way out in front of where the more calm, peaceful, joyful energy around things actually exists,

when we find ourselves, completely in will, completely in our own effort, we've stepped out of the flow. That's a really good time to pause. That's a really good time to listen.

That's a really good time to look at ourselves, and look at our actions, and look at our habits, and learn something, and grow.

And get back to the place where we feel like we're flowing with something real, rather than attempting to block something unwanted.

And when we're animated out of fear, we can really miss a lot of the guidance that our deeper selves is trying to give us, which can be pretty subtle, it can be, a little more vague, a little more gentle,

but it's always there. The problem is it can be drowned out through these harder, sharper feelings.

Because those can tend to be pretty loud. This is where the skill of listening comes in really handy. Because if we can really experience what our feelings are, if we can really notice why we tend to do things, what tends to happen,

and what all of this is seemingly trying to show us, then we can come from a completely different place.

And we can set down our will, our effort, and instead align with what we feel flows through us much more naturally, much more easily, much more calmly, much more joyfully.

We can actually do the things we are compelled to do out of a sense of good feelings, rather than the things we're motivated to do out of a sense of avoiding bad feelings, and we can relax.

Manic effort leads to more manic effort. If we create something through fear, we'll be living with that fear as long as this creation exists in our lives.

We can choose to create from different place, we can choose to act from a different place. We can choose to acknowledge the things we want, the things we feel guided towards, the deficits and lacks that we spot in our own life.

And we can find the light path to those things. We can engage our deeper feeling senses, and let our desires guide us to what we actually want.

We can trust that we have all the guidance inside of us that we will ever need. And if we're really listening, we're really paying attention,

we're really learning from what's happening and integrating these truths into our lives, we can find ourselves following a far different path.

We can find ourselves living our own path that's dictated by our own full self-expression. That isn't mitigated through fear. That's actually more about progressing towards love and light.

It isn't moving away from anything, it's moving toward. It isn't avoiding, it's including. It isn't being chased, it's actually more of a gentle pursuit.

And then we can tell by the energy we feel inside, in any particular thing that we're doing, how does it feel? Do we feel, called? Do we feel present? Do we feel whole? Do we feel light?

Or do we feel fractured? Do we feel frantic? Do we feel the darkness? Do we feel some dark hunger being fed instead of some delicious appetite being satiated?

And only we know, and only we can know. No one can tell us, but that's the beauty of never been able to lose our own guidance.

That's the beauty of always having this incredible sensory ability within ourselves, to know when we're aligned with ourselves, to know when we're whole.

To know when something is feeding that deep, precious light within ourselves. And to know when when we're feeding these darker appetites, and then being honest, really seeing ourselves, for who we are, and how we are.

Then moving forward with what feels like a better alignment, with what feels like greater wholeness. Because ultimately when we bring our whole selves to the things we want, then we'll be able to have a much fuller,

a much richer, a much deeper, a much more meaningful experience. Because we're not doing something to prevent something else, we're doing something to do precisely what we're doing.

We don't need to be aware of how this is meeting some other need. We don't have to be aware of how this might be causing problems for us somewhere else.

We can simply bask in the glow of what is, and that's what we're here to do, ultimately. Is fully express the deepest, purest, realest part of ourselves.

When we're locked in to fear, when we're locked into too much thinking, we're locked into too much reacting,

we're locked into all of these behavior patterns, we're not really us. We're not really fully us, anyway. If we can actually examine these habits, these behaviors, these patterns, then we can step through them.

Then we can descend a little deeper, we can act from a different place. And as we do, as we ride the spiral inward, in ourselves, the truths that we discover are far more durable, far more reliable.

And we're going when we've really found the core part of ourselves, who we really are, and we act from that place, our lives will be much more authentically ours.