Have you ever wondered why – with so many people talking about the need to make real changes in their lives – so very little actually changes? It's pretty obvious: Addiction, dependency, and the conflict and fear they breed, are more prevalent and problematic than ever before, even if made to appear otherwise by popular justification. But what isn't so obvious is the reason for this contradiction between our professed wish to change and our seeming inability to affect the same. The truth is that making any real change in our lives is impossible as long as we remain convinced that what needs changing is:
- The person we live with
- The masses of uninformed people around us who just don't "get it"
- The conditions we see as being beyond our power to change
- The pain or regrets of the past that keep pulling us down
- All of the above (or you fill in the blank)
Do you know anyone, including yourself, who hasn't struggled to change the problem areas in their lives... only to realize, when all is said and done, that not much real has changed save for one's growing level of frustration? Yet, as strange as it seems for now, it is just this realization – of having failed to liberate ourselves – that is a required leg in our journey to real independence. There are good reasons why we must face this disappointment before coming upon true freedom, but underlying them all is the following:
Only by awakening to the ineffectiveness of our past actions, and to our present level of understanding that gives rise to the same, does it become possible for us to shatter the limitations inherent in who and what we have been up until now.
When we've seen, known – directly – the futility of trying to change others, hating our own weaknesses, or the waste of railing against a world that won't stop wobbling, one simple truth shines out like the beam from a lighthouse that pierces the darkest of nights: Nothing within or around us can possibly be made different until we see, without equivocation, that we are the world that must change.
Each time we will strive to further understand ourselves, through our willingness to see some yet deeper truth about ourselves, then little by little we will attract to ourselves a higher strength that has no problem saying NO to what has never cared for us. This new NO is one and the same as saying YES to self-wholeness, the secret source of the happiness we had been seeking in all the wrong places.