Mindful Mondays: Don't Fight Life

Don’t fight life girl.   

These are words of wisdom from my Grandma Gummer for just about every situation in life when you are “working yourself up”.  Approaching life with impatience, anxiety, stress, frustration, a desire for control, discomfort in the unknown are all signs of fighting life.

What are you fighting with life about right now? 

Time? Limitations? Change? The future? Injustice? Money? Somebody else? Yourself? 

When we are fighting our thinking can become cloudy or rigid.  The energy of fighting can foster a loss of connection and dualistic thinking.  It creates a consciousness of separation and isolation which is an event in the mind, but it is not our true nature.  Our true nature is that we are part of Creation and deeply interconnected with all of life.  We are not to fight life, we are life.

Fighting keeps us pushing

and spinning

and crashing

and dominating our way through life

when what we really need to do is the most countercultural thing, which is to stop. 

We need to pause.  We need to breathe.  We need to connect.

Fighting can be part of the process, but our most creative, generative, healing, and revelatory times are not in the chaos of the fighting mind, it’s in the stillness of the mind.  It is in the pause where we find what we need. It is in the stillness of mind, spirit, and body where we can turn our attention to how life and Spirit is speaking to us, guiding us, and loving us.  It is in the stillness of mind where we find “the way”, moving into an alignment where our deepest self meets Spirit.

An excerpt from Hearts on Fire by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ: 

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

Photo: Grandma Gummer, Guyana, South America,  Photo credit: Aisha Becker-Burrowes