Beyond the Treadmill: The Power of Choice

Sometimes I wake up with a blank mind and sometimes with a mind full of worry. Sometimes I am under the influence of a beautiful dream and sometimes I dread to start the day. Is that something you can relate to?

Of course you can. We are all in the same boat, struggling to survive, to fulfil our obligations as father, mother, partner, friend, worker, etc… The list is endless. These are the faces we carry with us and wear them appropriately. The time we spend wearing these faces is consuming almost the whole day.

How much time is left for ourselves?

Sometimes we go to bed exhausted and it seems that we woke up just an hour ago.

How are we nurturing ourselves to cope with our self-imposed obligations?

How are we dealing with living a life on a polarized prison planet, where all of us are apparently condemned to live out a lifetime chained to a treadmill?

I have to constantly remind myself that life is not just about paying bills. Unfortunately, we don't live in a utopic society yet, where all labour has been replaced by robotic workers, allowing us to follow our passions in life. How do we break free from duty and obligation that we have not chosen ourselves? Society asks for conformity, bosses ask for ever-increasing productivity, leaving even less time for renewal. Humans are forced to reset their boundaries constantly to allow for ever-increasing demands on duty and obligation.

I'm sorry for reminding you of a reality where we are forced to shrink our boundaries constantly to accommodate duty and obligation, where fear is constantly besieging our freedom and life becomes a chore.

What if I told you, that there is something important you can do to enhance your life? What if I told you, that this is as easy to accomplish as switching on the lights or shaking hands or just smiling?

What if I told you that it’s up to ourselves to change our lives and that nobody will do that for us. This is part of our learning curve.

Let's remember that we are living in a universe that is a reflection of our internal world. All events we experience are fundamentally neutral and our perception of them is dictated by our frame of Heart. The universe is meaningless. The universe just is. Life is meaningless. We are just alive. We are the only ones who assign meaning to what happens to us. If we merely perceive the events that happen around us without judging them, they exert less influence on us. And if we attempt to extract a positive meaning from these events, we will always learn something new that we will use when it feels appropriate.

The mirror of the universe can be felt in infinite ways.

If we feel depressed, the world around us will remind us of our depression.

If we feel energized, the world arounds us will seem vibrant and full of opportunities.

If we are in love, our minds are infected with joy.

If we love ourselves, our boundaries are expanding naturally.

Our frames of Heart are generated by our Heart. Our feelings are unstructured messages spoken in the language of the Heart. We are constantly feeling something, whether we label it good or bad. These feelings are here to guide us and not to rob us of our sovereignty. At some point in the past we forgot that we are in charge of our ourselves, because we allowed ourselves to become overwhelmed by the events in our lives. We are constantly consumed by what happens in our lives, without thinking to pause for a moment.

Don’t get me wrong, I have to remind myself constantly that I am not at the mercy of my feelings and my conditioned mind, that's constantly hijacking those messages to distort and mislabel them, based on what my ego thinks is appropriate. Sometimes I forget and sometimes I remember. When I forget, life is relentless. When I remember, life becomes more bearable.

When I hit the pause button in my life, I stop thinking.

I feel my breath.

I feel my body.

I feel stray emotions.

I conceive a thought.

Sometimes I hear a thought.

I can do that for as long as I allow myself. The intensity of life is diminishing. I am still aware of duty and obligation, but I am not consumed by it anymore.

Sometimes I forget to pause, but whenever I remember, the experience becomes even more positive than before.

The reality of life's events becomes just an assortment of elements of life itself, instead of parts of the demon that was life just a few seconds before.

And if I allow myself to just be, without interference from my conditioning, I can accept even for a short while, that I am really, truly, genuinely in charge of myself and my life. The more I cultivate the state of just being, the more I can feel like that. When I am in the state of doing, my conditioning kicks in again.

After we practice this state of "being" enough, we can bring the state of being into our lives in a way that benefits us and push back our conditioning. The feelings of negative events will no longer hold sway over us and so will the feelings of positive events. Those feelings are replaced by a positive background noise within my mind that comes from my Heart.

All this is perhaps too alien, too strange to accept. Earlier in my life I discovered the immense power of choice and free will. I was feeling depressed and asked myself why I am feeling like this. Nothing made sense and I was unhappy with myself, to put it mildly. Then, out of the blue, divine inspiration struck. My inner voice told me to make a cup of coffee. I got up, went to the kitchen and made myself a cup of coffee, while I was wondering why I was making a coffee, when I had no motivation to do anything. Then it dawned on me. I was making use of my free will. Choice is breaking stagnation. It marshals all resources of consciousness, asserting leadership and control. Yes, leadership, I am not joking. Making decisions is the foundation of leadership. What I did was nothing less than taking charge of myself, even for a menial task as making a coffee.

Let us ponder a bit on choice. You might have heard the saying "with great power comes great responsibility". While it has been demoted to the status of a cliché, it nevertheless is true. The ability to make conscious choices and to exert free will are the most important abilities in our lives. They can move mountains or allow us to make coffee and everything in between. Whatever value we assign on these abilities will follow us throughout life. It is up to us and nobody else.

Making deliberate choices and sticking with them requires courage and willpower. Making deliberate choices and sticking with them requires courage and willpower. It requires constant vigilance and the resolve to see the results of our decisions manifested. It is as easy as we allow it to be. And it makes the difference between living a life on a polarized prison planet or living a life on a paradise planet where choice and free will empowers us to be who we are, enables us to follow our passions and expands our consciousness by discovering the meaning of life as we perceive it for ourselves. Everything goes.

Let's remember to make deliberate choices whenever we can. Of course, we can make bad choices, but we learn from them, as long as we extract a positive meaning from the repercussions of those choices, based on the reflections of the universe itself.

Let's make the fundamental choice to live more a fulfilling life. This has always been our choice - one that we unfortunately forgot, becoming overwhelmed with life. We can wield the power of choice again. And we will never stop using this ability once we grok its immense value.

Let's get to work, changing our lives for the better. Showtime!