Doing vs. Allowing

• May 21, 2021

Maybe you’ve noticed there’s an awful lot of life to be without there.

There are people that are being hateful, and others that are trying to compensate by being cloying and suffocating. There are people that are caught up in negativity, and other people that are allergic to anything other than over-ripe positivity.

There are people ignorant and filled with fear, and other people hiding their own fears and ignorance behind veils labeled “woke” and “spiritual”.

The fundamental challenge to being a human is BEing with all of this. To BE with something means exactly that — to simply sit and be with it, fully-expressed as ourselves, wide- and open-hearted, and simply allow whatever is showing up, to continue showing up, exactly the way it’s showing up.

Most of our efforts, as we age, grow, and push out into the world around us, are spent developing strategies to avoid having to be with certain parts of life.

If you grew up poor, and being poor was significant and problematic, then a lot of your later efforts in life tend to become about ensuring you never have to be poor again. If you grew up hurt by people that bulldozed your opinions and uniqueness with their own, then a lot of your efforts are likely about ensuring that there is no bulldozing and no voice goes unheard.

Don’t worry, there’s no escaping this fate. This is part of our fundamental human nature. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, all of your attempts to try to be “fully open” and allow all of life will simply end up cutting out other swaths of life.

For example, some people (like me) get really into personal development, and then start learning how to speed-read and absorb material through podcasts even faster (“I’m listening to podcasts at 8x!”), ensuring that they can get through all of the material and maximize the amount of life they’re receiving. Alas, they’re unable to see that what they can’t be with is the possibility of things being left on the table. No capacity to be with things left behind, or even “wasted time” (whatever that actually means).

A transformational process runs counter to this default human tendency. Rather than give you more stuff to do, the support is generally to move things out of the way so as to allow your life to unfold and open AS YOU. All of the strategies, patterns, and approaches you’ve learned to avoid being with something are now in the way of what will allow you to continue opening.

If you have created brilliant strategies to ensure that no one ever concludes you don’t know what you’re doing, then letting go of those strategies and being willing to be confronted with this very experience is what will set you free and allow you to grow beyond this point.

This doesn’t mean the game is to go and deliberately instigate people feeling this way about you. That would just be more doing — a new layer of strategy on top of the same inability to be with something.

What sets you free is you trying your best, and being willing to allow the full range of experience that follows. If you can develop the fortitude to simply BE with people concluding you don’t know what you’re doing, all of the strategies you’ve built on top of that fall away. It’s not that you have to do something or create new habits or any of that. They quite simply become irrelevant.

If you’re spending your life painting red things blue, because you’ve got a story that red is bad, and we address and shift that story for you, all of the work spent painting things blue becomes pointless. All of your strategies designed to ensure you always have more buckets of blue paint on hand, and never travel anywhere without a paint roller, and hiring an assistant to double-check your AirBnB bookings to ensure there’s no red (“Ha, I’ve optimized my life by delegating this task! I’m growing!”)… All of that stuff simply falls away. It’s no longer necessary.

Left in its place is a space for you to unfold and continue growing into what is next.

This is the miracle of transformation.