Are You Surviving or Thriving?
If you take a close look at your daily life, you’ll notice that you are caught in one of two dynamics:
1. You are just getting by, trying to make it through the day and are inundated by stressful circumstances, boredom, routine, or habits
2. You are truly enjoying your life, spending most of your time in a state of appreciation for who you are and what you have, living your life free from limitation
If you were to be brutally honest with yourself and assess which one of these scenarios best describes you, which one would it be? Of course, the follow up question we all need to ask is, what will it take for you to shift into #2 on a consistent basis?
My experience is that the first step is always becoming acutely aware of the actual reality of our situation as human beings in the modern world. We actually have to see with total clarity all of the obstacles, forces, and layers of conditioning that are imposed upon us that keep us locked in a state of mere survival. While this may sound easy enough, it is a truly radical stance to take to become a fully empowered person who can simply observe the dynamics of our modern world without becoming identified with or attached to them.
A big part of life purpose is the process of overcoming various obstacles, external ones being conventional influences such as the media, religious dogma, and educational ideologies that conflict with the manifestation of our deepest nature, and internal ones being attachment to difficult emotions, negative beliefs, and the tendency to lapse into a habitual or rote stance with our daily life.
In the Buddhist tradition, it is often said that awareness itself heals. This means that we actually don’t have to necessarily ‘do’ anything with our problems and issues; simply paying attention to them in a state of compassionate awareness is itself a transformative process. Lack of awareness feeds our habitual tendency to ‘just get by’, assuming that our identities and the world we live in are set in stone and that we just have to deal with what we have in the best way we can.
Thriving, on the other hand, is a state of total self-empowerment where we renounce any tendency toward being a victim in life by subscribing to resigned beliefs such as, ‘this is just how life is’. Thriving takes a daily commitment to shake things up and never, ever take for granted the preciousness and poignancy of our human existence. It is a revolutionary act of acknowleding and then acting upon the sacred role we have to fulfill in this universe. In this sense, we stay ‘on our toes’, knowing that we are not here to just protect our own territory or to make ourselves more comfortable. We are here to help others.
If you feel that you are stuck in survival mode, you have to see that this is a choice. Now, when I tell this to a lot of my clients, they often don’t like hearing it. It may sound offensive. But to someone who is really ready to change, the realization that we can choose a more empowering life is incredibly liberating. Most of us, however, just simply aren’t willing to change. Even though we aren’t deeply fulfilled and free in our current way of being, we are comfortable. And there is a fear of stepping out of that security and into the unknown. Until there is a strong motivation to jump into uncertainty, we will stay entrenched in our current patterns. We have to get sick of mediocrity before we can evolve.
Of course, your practice is always the perfect laboratory to explore these issues. I have always found my practice to be a very concentrated version of how I am relating to life in general. Like it or not, it has always been the perfect mirror for how I am living my life. This is why I love coaching practitioners so much. When we focus on creating prosperity and success in their practice, it opens up their entire life. You can’t change your practice for the better without changing yourself for the better. It is amazing to me to witness the personal changes practitioners go through as they step out of their comfort zone and assert themselves as successful business owners.
Kevin Doherty, L.Ac.
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