My fundamental belief is that every single one of us here on purpose. We all have a powerful gift (or gifts) that we are meant to give this world and our lives are meant to be the realizing of expressing those gifts out in the world. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that, too often, it is our relationship with ourselves that gets in the way of our ability to live our purpose and so my work has been focused on helping people have positive, healthy relationships with themselves so that they can go out and do what they are meant to do in this world and help it (the world) and us as we move towards collective healing.
One of my favorite ways to do that work these days is in retreat with individuals who are profoundly working on their self-care so that they can more powerfully live their purpose. Recently, at a self-care retreat for non-profit Executive Directors, one of the participants shared that as part of her self-care plan she was going to start running, even though she really hated running.
The group’s reaction to this plan was instant and visceral.
“Why do something you hate?” We all asked. Self-care, we insisted, shouldn’t feel like punishment.
A few weeks later, I was talking to the would-be runner in a follow-up phone call and she shared something that has been on my mind ever since.
“What was your biggest takeaway from the retreat,” I asked.
“I realized I don’t have to be miserable,” she said. “I remember I was saying what some of my self-care goals would be for that week, and I said I was going to run even though I hate it and everyone was like, ‘Why would you do that if you don’t like it’ and I just realized that I don’t have to do anything that makes me unhappy. Why struggle? I just have to be conscious about struggling- and choosing to not struggle because it is not supposed to be that hard.”
For a moment after she said this, I was just silent, thinking about all the ways that I choose to struggle because I think struggle might be virtuous. Not the struggle that is the path towards a goal that you really want (waking up early to create or working an extra job to pay for a dream or whatever) but the struggle that we choose because we want to make things hard for ourselves, because we think that we deserve hard for hard’s sake, because we’re inflicting a little bit of punishment on ourselves.
Ever since that conversation, I’ve had struggle on my mind- trying to consciously observe what is going on with my struggles when I face them. I am asking myself:
Is this a struggle that I am actively choosing because I want what is on the other side of it or is this a struggle that I am inflicting because there is a part of me that believes that thieving from joy and ease is virtuous (spoiler alert: it’s not). And every time I realize that the struggle is born from a place of lack, I am actively letting it go.
There is just so little time and just so much that I want to be doing and I can live more of my purpose in my world if I am not constantly sending myself to faux-timeouts with struggles that I am manufacturing. And I know that I am not alone. Is there a way that you are forcing struggle on yourself these days? And is there a way that you can let that struggle go and invite more flow into your life rather than resistance?
