“Argue for your limitations and sure enough they are yours” – Richard Bach
All day long, in one communication and another, I heard dear friends use emphatic statements to describe “how it is,” as if they were speaking the absolute truth, like:
“It’s really hard to…” find a publisher, a place to rent, get away, land another job, leave a relationship, find the time, get organized, etc. “I must be in the wrong place.” “You can’t expect to…” “That’s just how it is.”
WHO SAYS?
I can hear my parents’ voices raising that question time and again, when I’d insist, “it’s really hard to…,” “it must be a mistake,” “I can’t just do that!”, “that’s how it’s done,” and so on. I have them to thank for that lesson in Mindfullness – questioning not only the status quo and “authorities,” but encouraging me to think for my self and not make excuses.
I can’t say I never fall into that kind of mind-numbing, matter-of-fact phraseology, but I know that upon questioning, “Who Says?”, or (in Byron Katie’s words, “Can you know that’s absolutely true?”) the nonsense of it becomes clear. Insisting on limitations, road blocks, lack of alternatives, is a way to stop our selves, to justify “no reason to try” or consider options and possibilities. We overwhelm ourselves with what we believe is an insurmountable challenge. We collapse into escape, fantasy or smallness rather than experiencing the joy of creatively making our way through to satisfying conclusion. Once we believe any idea to be set-in-stone, we become as hard and inflexible as rocks.
Such statements are no doubt born of fear; fear of failure, loss, embarrassment. Fear always contracts and limits. The heart yearns to open up, the mind loves to find solutions and the body to breathe deeply. So, I can trust that whenever I declare “how it is,” my body will respond either in tension and contraction, or relaxation and expansion.
When I hear myself saying or thinking, “I/you can’t…”, “It isn’t…”, “There’s nothing I can do…”, I sometimes remember to ask myself: Self, does that thought feel deadening and self-justifying, or is it exciting and enlivening? I hear my parent’s asking, “Who says?” And I just have to laugh at what a stubborn little girl I can be sometimes… and my girlfriends too.
