It's Up to You Which Direction Your Life Takes
Key Lesson: Stop complaining. Start changing. The appearance of every moment comes with a mostly unseen pair of "buttons": one says "down." The other says "up." The direction that life takes is your choice. Choose wisely!
Start Taking Conscious Risks
A spiritual risk is any action we will take based on our willingness to challenge our own certainty that our present state of consciousness represents the full measure of life's possibility. Here is one simple example: Maybe we feel as though no one understands our situation or that no one is being sensitive to the pressure we're under. During these times most of us feel the strong need to complain to someone -- anyone (including ourselves) -- in order to win some sympathy. The conscious risk in this case is to give no voice to any complaints, either outwardly or inwardly.
Whenever we feel ourselves certain that we are a captive of something -- be it anything from a fear of proceeding with a wish we have, to that feeling of being inadequate to getting through a task at hand -- we remember in this same self-defining moment that this reality before our eyes is, at best, only a partial one. And then, as unthinkable as it seems to us in this same moment, as certain as we may feel that real freedom is beyond our reach, we make a conscious leap into the unknown.
Once we realize that our present view of self, a view that defines our reality, is a construct of a certain level of our own consciousness -- one that's convinced the limit of its present view is the limit of its possibility -- we also realize the need to leave this self-limited world behind us.
Knowing the makeup of this world we must abandon, we have but one choice: Let go of who we are sure we are and make a leap into something new. Our conscious choice is to discover what awaits us in an open-ended reality, instead of allowing ourselves to be grounded by a preconceived notion of who we are and what we can do.
Nothing can stop us from taking this leap into all that we may be, other than this mistaken and unconscious conviction we have of who we already are -- a mindset supported by the strange comfort we find in clinging to who we have been.
Find the places in your life where you can take these conscious, spiritual risks. The liberation you win will be the repeated discovery that the only thing holding you captive is yourself.
