MASTER OF LIMITATION 

Human experiencing

Having a human experience often feels like one hard thing after the next.  Roadblocks, challenges, and hoops to jump through every single day.  Wanting things to work out, manifest and be as we desire them to be often feels like one failure and miss after another.  All of the little annoying arising we must deal with when we would much rather just feel flow and ease.  We get tastes of flow and ease, but then, just like that, it seems to disappear and we find ourselves trodding uphill, against the current of life and fighting against what we don’t want, so that we can hopefully get to what we do.  Why isn’t it easier?  If we are all powerful creators like all of the spiritual teachers tell us we are, then why can’t we have what we desire in each moment?  These are great questions, for which I don’t have any grand answers, except that, this is the way it is.  It’s as if we are here to learn how to navigate in an environment of extreme challenge and limitation.

The experience of limitation of capabilities, capacities, power, resources, opportunities and overall self, can really dim the joy we experience.  It takes whatever light is inside of us, and like a dimmer switch, gets lower and lower, until we can’t see anymore and all we experience is darkness, confusion, and powerlessness.  We don’t know who we are, what we are or why we are.  We just feel disconnected.  This is suffering.  This is, for the most part, the human experience.  The fact that we can find levity, joy and some sense of purpose, is nothing short of a miracle considering it all.  In suffering it’s hard to be grateful and nearly impossible to feel connected.  I’m not sure why it’s necessary that we experience this, only that somehow it’s relevant because we are experiencing it.  

I could hypothesis that perhaps it’s simply to learn how to be a master of limitation.  Not necessarily to overcome it and no longer experience it, though that is all well and fine if you do, but to develop ourselves in such a way that no matter what handicaps we have given ourselves or that have been given to us, we can learn how to adapt and use whatever it is that we have available to us in whatever ways that we can.  We may want it all to be a bit more magical than that, especially if we’ve experienced states of being where we were less bound by limitations.  Yet perhaps it’s about allowing ourselves to have this human experience of limitation, exploring what we will inside of it, and being a master of limitation, rather than trying to somehow get beyond it all so that we don’t experience it anymore.     

CHANGING THE SEER 

Mastering being human

When we allow ourselves to have the experience of limitation, challenge, obstacle, inconvenience and the like, we embrace our experience rather than fight it.  This embracing of the experience doesn’t necessarily change the outer experience, but it does change our inner one.  We may still not like what is happening, it may not be our preference or desire, but it no longer has us completely hooked.  We are less triggered and therefore inherently less bound and more spacious inside of the experience of whatever the limitation is.  Well this might not equal the experience we want to be experiencing, it will end our resistance to what is and we will feel more accepting and empowered just by that shift.  

While it might not feel like you choose this human experience and everything that comes with it, somehow here you are.  You’ve arrived here, chosen or not, and the only thing you can do is make the best out of it.  It’s kind of like arriving to a party that you find to be less exciting than you originally thought it would be.  You find it rude to exit the party early, so you can either drag yourself through the party until it ends or you can find some way to make it kind of interesting for yourself.  That is where your choice comes in.  You may not always get to choose the environment of the party and all of the people at it, but you do get to choose how you want to experience it.  As I see it this is true self-empowerment.  

We often get confused by all the messages we hear about how to manifest our reality and make it what we want it to be.  We think this means that we should have all the things we desire to have, and when we don’t have them we somehow think we are failing, and then feel even more frustrated by our lack in making our situations different than they are.  Being the creator of your reality is not about controlling all of the circumstances, situations and happenings of your life to match your preference.  It about shifting your inner state of being to match the state of being you prefer to be in no matter what is happening with the situations and experiences of your life.  It is easy to be in our preferred state of being when everything looks and feels like we want it too.  It is quite a challenge to do so when life doesn’t.  This is how we become a master of limitation.  

No matter what limitation, obstacle, or the grim appearance of our life shows to us, in order to become a master of limitation you must only look out and see what you prefer to see, rather than what your mind tells you is there.  Some people might call this delusion, I prefer to call it sanity.  It might just be the only true way to change the world.  As we see so it is.  Without this skill, and eventual mastery, you are subjected to what your mind tells you that you are experiencing rather than innerly experiencing what you desire to experience.  When you take your cue from the grim appearance of life, rather than from yourself and what you desire to see, you are left feeling absolute powerlessness, from which no change can occur.  To master limitation you must accept what you see, and rather than try to change the appearance of it, change that which is doing the looking, which is you. 

Dr. Amanda Love, Network Spinal Chiropractor, Boulder, Colorado