Growth Amidst Chaos

When you’re trying to stay focused on your balancing and maintenance of personal, professional, and spiritual growth, many distractions abound to break your stride, interrupting your maturation and expansion.

As you turn your attention toward maintaining your love vibration and protect your sacred space, circumstances, challenges, and situations crash into your otherwise upwardly mobile progress by any means possible, using the manmade distractors such as “the news,” TV, media, personal communication devices, Google, social media, books, magazines, celebrity gossip, money hardship, relationships with others, or other emotional stressors.

The crux of your growth and expansion is to focus your attention within, yet there are so many methods which society and the “powers that be” utilize to keep you so distracted that staying in the zone for any amount of time is difficult at best.

Taking time to center yourself in quiet repose can give you the pause necessary to adequately review the events of your life in the recent past (yesterday, last week, last month) to give you a good idea about which distractions have the greatest distractibility quotient over you. This recognition sheds light on the areas in your life that may need tending to.

“Everything was going along great, then all of a sudden…”

Whatever comes after that helps to identify particular weaknesses or chinks in your armor. With a little attention to these areas you can repair the damage, or eliminate altogether, any future risk of penetration.

And if that weren’t enough, there’s enough discord among the faith systems of the world to keep you utterly confused about which way to go, as you’re trying to make your own way while staying true to your own purpose, message, passion, and mission.

Everyone has their own idea of how you should approach your spiritual relationship with the ultimate power of the universe, but others are not aware enough to know that while their path may be a perfect match for where they are in their own journey, it may not be perfect for you. In fact, someone else’s path may actually be counterproductive for your continued growth and expansion; another distraction.

The perfect clue to help you identify that someone else’s faith-system is not for you and does not support your highest and best will be the degree of pressure they impose upon you to convert or conform to their point of view. If their insistence is unfailing, threatening, borderline abusive, or destructive, common sense dictates this is not the path of love’s growth and expansion.

Love’s growth and expansion includes the divinity of all forms of life in all their various styles and perspectives, all in various stages of awakening. Even though some may be stagnant, immature, against the flow, or even considered to be controlling, predatory, or evil, all are perfectly divine in their own way.

Separateness keeps us divided, does not support expansive growth, makes humanity stagnate, and is unsustainable, while allowing other people and their ideas simply “to be” while finding more ways to grow and expand one’s self, understanding that we are individuals, yet “one” in love, is the current evolutionary process of the human race.

How we interact with others reveals the nature of our emotional/spiritual condition. If your approach is to either accept like-minded people and reject those who present different approaches to life, you could do better. A fully engaged love vibration will have you seeing the sacredness in all life. The contrast actually helps to promote the evolution of humanity.

At some point, when the evolution hits critical mass, only love will be sustainable, and that which is not love will simply deteriorate and fade away. Until then, the best we can do is to love everyone and everything with all we’ve got, doing the best we can with what we have to move this expansive evolutionary process forward.

Don’t take things personally, find opportunities to accept what is, love and bless everyone and everything as you discover new methods of staying focused within yourself, tending to your own life and growth, while allowing others the same courtesy.

The distractions and interactions with others actually support your continued growth, if you increasingly approach all these things in love, and training your attention to focus on the sacred divinity of all things, while focusing on that which is good, beautiful, and loving.

When You Let Someone Hurt You

When you let someone hurt you, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that someone has struck out at you, even assaulted you. When your feelings are hurt because of what someone else said or did, it might be more difficult to realize that the responsibility for how you feel is on you, not the other person.

You make the choice to allow someone else’s words of deeds offend, hurt your feelings, or affect you in a negative way because you could also choose to not let whatever anyone else says of does to affect you.

While enduring all kinds of torture and suffering, Viktor E. Frankl, said, “The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

While being beaten for practicing civil disobedience, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

These are both excellent examples of men who chose to rise above their current situation to disallow anyone else to exercise dominion over their state of mind. You too, can have this unshakeable resolve, if you so choose.

We go through life with the default setting of allowing other people to hurt us deeply and even feel the pain in our bodies as if we’d been beaten, assaulted, or tortured, when we have not actually been touched, and this is our choice.

We choose to feel sick to our stomachs, suffer sleepless nights, low energy levels, depression, and little motivation even to eat or get out of bed because of what someone else treated us. This is a lot of power over us to be granted to another person.

As perverse as this might be, it’s an attitude which you have been programmed to hold tight to as a method to control you within the prison of your own mind. Many heroic individuals have discovered this and broken through the programming to find their own peace in any circumstance.

You can choose to have the power to not let anyone shake your state.

Once you discover that you have the choice to be unmoved by anyone or anything outside yourself, you also realize that when you let someone hurt you, have made the choice to allow someone to affect you deeply out of respect or love, if you so desire.

From this vantage point you have the knowingness and power of your control over your state of mind at any time regardless of what other people think, say, or do. You are the master of your emotional state.

This high level of emotional maturity is within the grasp of anyone with the courage to grasp the idea and wrap their heart around such a concept.

There’s no need to look back at all the wasted hours, days, and living of life by being overly concerned about the dominion you allowed others to have over you. What is important is that from here on out, you are the master of your emotional state.

Nothing can hurt you.

Disappointment, fear, offensive statements, abusive circumstances (even the most unimaginable) are no longer effective weapons against you.

Also, letting go of expectations can be an effective tool in allowing others to have control over you, for if you let go of the emotional attachment to the expectation of a particular response or outcome, your emotional state is not at risk and cannot be shaken.

You decide to live your life in a state of pain and suffering or love and joy.

When you let someone hurt you, it is not without your invitation or permission.