Happy Sunday!
And welcome to today's edition of 'Conscious living with Purnima'. In today's post I explore two ideas:
1. Our tendency to seek Band-aids over deeper healing and
2. Our skewed relationship with time
The two thoughts are closely connected. Let me know if they resonate with you.
Band-Aids
Many a time we use a Band-aid to give us some temporary relief and then forget that it's only a Band-aid that we used and didn't heal ourselves fully.
Let's take the area of personal growth for instance. We may think we are cultivating self-love by repeating to ourselves, "I am enough". We do this because it's what most self-help gurus have asked us to do. To look in the mirror and say, “I love you” or repeat positive affirmations such as, “I am enough”. We do it and feel better almost instantly. But that's only a Band-aid. And it's important to be aware of that.
If we want to heal and grow then a more pertinent question to ask ourselves would be, 'why we feel the need to do that in the first place?', 'What is it that's making us feel not enough?' When we ask ourselves these uncomfortable questions, we may come face to face with deeper issues that we are avoiding like our unmet needs or our habits that don't serve us, our faulty ideas & beliefs that need questioning or our unsupportive environment. We will come face to face with that which needs addressing so we can heal fully.
Let's look at one other area of our life say, ‘Health and Fitness’. We may have many different goals in this area. Let's for the sake of discussion pick weight loss. Most people will jump straight to, "tell me what is to be done to achieve weight loss?". "What is to be done?" is actually not too difficult to garner. Most of us know what is to be done. The struggle is in doing those things.
So, the more pertinent question here is not "what to do?", but “what are the barriers that are preventing us from doing what needs to be done?”. And when we ask that, many things will come up - our mindset, habits, environment just to name a few. And if we really want a permanent solution to our problem then we need to start working with those.
But most people will want a blueprint (aka a Band-aid) that tells them how many grams of something to eat and how many steps to accomplish or what workout to do or how many glasses of water to drink so they can force all of those things on themselves and see results.
Superficial changes can only bring superficial results for the short term.
There is a beautiful quote by Rumi on love that reads, “Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
And I think that core thought can be taken to every aspect of our life. The word love can be replaced with just about anything we seek, and it will still hold good. True healing requires us to dig deep, identify the deeper issues and take the necessary steps to resolve them.
Our skewed relationship with time
Right from school days we have grown up with the idea of time scarcity. We are given only one academic year to understand all the concepts of that year, it cannot be taken forward into the next. Only ‘so much time’.
Even adult years are filled with deadlines and deliveries to be done 'on time'.
In our heads we always seem to be short of time. We feel psychologically rushed, the need to prove ourselves sooner rather than later is a compelling underlying emotion for most of us. Many of us have to consciously learn and train to slow down because it isn't something that comes naturally to us. There is fear associated with 'slowing down'. The fear of being left behind.
But if you look to some of the great philosophers, and meditators you will hear a whole different narrative.
Lao Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher, said to draw inspiration from nature. He said, "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished".
And it is true, isn't it?
An old Zen proverb reads, “You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes every day - unless you're too busy; then you should sit for an hour.”
If the great philosophers are saying this, then it should mean something.
It seems counterintuitive but the more we slow down, the better is our ability to see things clearly and acting from that space, we function better. Hurrying slows our learning and real growth.
It is perhaps our time scarcity mindset that makes us seek Band-aids.
If we believed that we had abundant time, then don't you think we would be seeking more permanent solutions to our life problems?
As we come to the end of this post, I invite you to reflect on your own life. Can you recognize the band aids? And how about your relationship with time - Do you feel the need to rush or are you comfortable slowing down?
I hope the answers awaken you to something you missed.
Wonderful insights. In my initial slow down period when I was attempting to slow down, I named the in between feeling, the liminal feeling that I can now connect back to the process of rewiring and reframing the idea of slowing down. It’s feeling both needs simultaneously and that feeling can thrawt the efforts to slow down. I called it the “slow rush” and wrote quite a few poems about it when I was in the thick clouds of it.
It’s knowing I needed to be slower but simultaneously feeling an inner pressure to move faster, be more. It is utterly confusing in the psyche, especially for the wounded who need to tend to and be tended to during these times of healing.
It is not a comfortable place but the first problem for me to understand is that being slower(short term or perhaps settling into a different speed entirely)and the need to be slow is not a defect of character nor does it mean you are not good enough, but is a necessity to becoming a whole human. Your individual expression of human can only be heard first within yourself but you cannot hear or understand that if you are moving faster than what is truly natural to your body. It is a individual journey and incredibly uncomfortable but it can be done and the other side is so much more free.
Thank you for your insights this week. I look forward to your wise words.
With kindness and appreciation,
Rae