Empower your life with kind attention
On confronting your own attitude & staying fully present
Happy Sunday!
And welcome to today's edition of 'Conscious living with Purnima'. In today's post I have two thoughts to share with you:
1. How we can truly experience growth
2. The need to be fully present with our lives
I hope you find something to reflect, respond & act on. Do write back or post in comments if you have anything to share. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject :)
1. How we can truly experience growth
“Fall in love with taking care of yourself. Fall in love with the path of deep healing. Fall in love with becoming the best version of yourself but with patience, with compassion and respect to your own journey.”
- S. Mcnutt
I love the second half of that quote - “with patience, with compassion and respect to your own journey”.
Oftentimes we lose this realistic perspective of our own journey. Be it in the realm of health, fitness, personal growth, relationships, or any other aspect of life, unless we pay attention to our own mindset (years of conditioning, unique to us), habits (conscious+unconscious), and environmental influences, we will always find ourselves stuck.
The need is to pay attention, acknowledge the inherent struggles we face in these areas and gently work with ourselves to find a breakthrough.
In those breakthroughs, lie our growth.
“The First step of change is to become aware of your own bullshit.”
2. Being present with our lives
As a fitness trainer I often tell my clients to listen to their bodies. Because if they don't, they can injure themselves.
The same idea can be extended to how we live our life. Here the question being,
“Are you listening to your life?”
Viktor Frankl in his book, “Man’s search for meaning”, said something very powerful. He said, instead of asking what's the purpose of your life, ask what's life asking of you.
Do you believe that where you are is exactly where you are supposed to be? I find that when I believe in this idea, I am able to catch thoughts like, “why didn't I do this before”, or “I deserve to be at a better place” more often. And challenging these thoughts enables me to look deeper for the lessons in my immediate experience.
Nothing in our lives is a coincidence. The people, situations, experiences are all there for good reason. Instead of resisting what is, if we pay kind attention, then we can unravel the hidden lessons. Learning them is a whole different thing (often challenging & evoking resistance in us) but atleast we become aware of what it is we need to learn.
“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”
- Eckhart Tolle
As a new week starts tomorrow, I invite you to start paying more attention to what life presents to you in the form of experiences, people, thoughts, feelings & situations. And see if that awakens you to something.
If u listen to your bodies wouldn't that be just staying within our comfort zone? :)
As usual, you aced it Puri. This week too, you were right on the head. Good writing.