Operating in the mystery
The truth of the moment
Every moment is a total mystery. Whether or not you think you know what the next moment will bring, the truth is that you really don’t. The mind likes to plan, organize, and structure what will come next. This gives us a false sense of stability, safety and okness. In some ways this is important because to live in total not knowing is too terrifying and destabilizing for most people. While in other ways, to not operate in the mystery at least some of the time, is detrimental to your growth and evolution.
Operating strictly in the mind’s need for sameness, security and stability keeps you rather confined, rigid, and overtime feeling stuck and not present in your day to day life. When this happens your mind is running its own script over what is really true, which is the unknown or the mystery. You can identify if your mind is running its own script if you find yourself not in the moment of what you are engaged in doing and instead thinking about what happened yesterday, when your “day will be over”, what you will have for dinner or the plans you have tomorrow, next week or next month.
Even if your past experiences or future plans excite you, your focus on them can rob you of the present moment that is here and now and also create the illusion that things will happen in a specific sequence or certain way. What you think does become your reality, even if that reality isn’t necessarily the truth. One of the many pitfalls of this “mind created reality” is that you get so fixated on what you’ve planned that you actually begin to believe that that is the way it is supposed to be. Then when things don’t turn out how you believe they were supposed to turn out you feel upset, sad, angry, bummed, frustrated or like something is out of alignment. None of those feelings are bad, in fact they are normal, but what often happens is people turn to blame or shame and get fixated on what they think should have happened instead of what IS happening. In that moment you lose your connection to the mystery, synchronicity and wonder of life and momentarily stop seeing the magic of the moment until you can rest in and embrace the mystery again.
Finding comfort in the unknown
Requirements for living in the mystery
There are a few skills to learn that are pivotal for being able to operate in the mystery and getting more comfortable with the unknown. Those are the skills of faith/surrender and not knowing.
The first skill is “not knowing”. So much throughout our ordinary life we are taught to know things. We label, define and giving meaning to everything we perceive. These are skills we learn starting the day we are born and they fall under the category of “knowing”. Not very often do we practice “not knowing”. To practice not knowing means that we have to momentarily suspend our thoughts, meanings and definitions of things that we perceive. For example instead of opening your kitchen cabinet, looking inside of it and saying in your mind “these are dishes”, allow yourself to not define or label what you see. You can do this with people in your life as well. Instead of looking at your spouse and saying/thinking “this is Tom or Jill” and laying on top of them all of the qualities you think they possess, allow yourself to simply see them without any labels or definitions. You may be surprised to see how things and people begin to seem and respond differently when you stop defining them in a certain way.
The second skill is faith (aka surrender). Yes faith is a skill and one that we are running out of time to learn on this planet. The veils that separate us from source, love, or our inseparability-oneness are becoming thinner and thinner, and soon our full connection will be re-established. Once those veils are lifted the lessons of faith will become obsolete as we will be in full remembrance, but until then faith is essential to learn.
Faith is trusting in something bigger than you that you have no proof exists; the unknown and unseen. To some this may seem religious, but faith does not need to solely fall underneath religion. It is simply trusting in the support that something is orchestrating and intelligently designing life, so you don’t have to call every single shot. You develop faith by loosening your grips of control. This could look like making a “hard” decision, perhaps one that you have some doubt about, and instead of thinking about all the possible scenarios that could or could not happen from having made this decision, you let go of the mental constraint, and trust that it will work out perfectly no matter how it works out.
Faith/surrender and not knowing are in some ways the easiest skills to learn because instead of requiring us to DO something to learn them, they require us to STOP doing, thinking and allow. This is contrary to what most of us think as “learning”. Someone once said that “all learning is unlearning” and that couldn’t be more true than here now and in learning how to operate in the true mystery of life.
Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado