It’s a much more complicated issue as to why we search for the things we need externally rather than internally. Perhaps it seems easier that way, perhaps we are more afraid of ourselves than we are of allowing outer circumstances and relationships to impact our own internal wellbeing. However, there truly is no escaping our situation, our challenges without spending time with our internal landscape, our internal selves. What is inner will always determine what is outer. And while we are naturally subject to projection and shaping from our relationships, from our upbringing, we are ruled by those influences until we begin to change the internal landscape. Imagine only ever addressing the outside, only ever trying to fix relationships or your professional life, without fixing you, among everything in life you are the common factor.
I have had the tendency for years to move from one city to the next when life got hard because I was in search of a clean slate, a new identity, a new life. Naturally, I would feel a high from the novelty and newness factor at first, but soon enough I would find myself back in my own skin again. Eventually, I decided to do the internal work, and then I began to settle down, I became the captain of my own ship, my own happiness, my own sense of self-worth.
As I began building a relationship with myself much as I have always done with others, I began to see a vast internal landscape, almost an adventure inside the self that would never end. At this point, I began studying meditation and the neuroscience of happiness and resilience. Through meditation, I would spend so much time simply exploring the internal. I felt like I had an ocean of sensations and experiences and thoughts to explore, and none of it was truly scary like I thought it would be. Of course, there is the wisdom that once fear is faced it is hardly scary at all, this is as old as the hills but it is true.
Imagine fear as an internal wall, you break it by facing it, by simply being with whatever it is that you fear, staring it in the face. Always being with the breath, always breathing through each wall, each thick cloud of energy until you come out the other side. Sometimes it takes seconds, sometimes, minutes or hours. But you always come out the other side, feeling lighter, stronger, and much happier, almost as if you shed a layer of skin. If you are looking for change in your life, know that is starts within you and not outside of you. Sit in meditation or find a pen and paper to write through stream of consciousness.
Just begin the process by exploring what is inside you, like a traveler hiking the vast landscape of your internal self.
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