How Are We Re-Imagining Our selves?

Cont’d from Our Present Is Not For the Faint-Hearted

It’s true that our breath is the connecting door to our inner world and to our outer world.

It’s true that it brings renewed vitality, purposeful tension and release to all of our being, not just our lungs.

It’s also true that imagination works as the interface between the conscious and the subconscious.

Together with Soul, breath and imagination are us.

Us, as we are … wrapped in the body suit of bones and fluids that’s linked to our name and status … in this lifetime.

Together, breath, Soul and imagination keep us connected to our brave inner warrior.

Heads up #1: just like the devastation of the planet demands our immediate attention, so does our depleted inner scape.

Heads up #2: every moment, every occurrence we internalise as ‘challenging’, ‘complicated’, ‘nasty’ or ‘unfair’ is an entry point into our hidden capacities.

And they are the ones we need to re-imagine.

We delete their imprints.

We rewrite the scripts.

Reality check: each stressful or depleting moment has a flipside that grants us access to possibilities we could never imagine.

That’s provided we actively accept such moments – one nanosecond – one breath at a time – with courage bolstered by heart-based coherence.

It is in that gap that our inner strength resides.

It is from our inner strength that we re-imagine What-Is.

How we respond to pressure, how we treat others is how we surreptitiously treat ourselves. It is how one or more persons have treated us in the past. It is how others will also one day treat us. And that’s partly because, as long as we are wading in the energy of our past, not much can shift in the string of moments underfoot such as we have co-created them with the universe.

Because our neural wiring is ancient, we, humans, are not quick learners when it comes to shifting our emotional mindset.

We just have to remember that our duty of care to ourselves and our loved ones is not to add salt to our injuries.

It’s not for us to aggravate our wounds.

Heads up #3: when we learn to connect with our higher self, we find an emotional balance between grace and dominance – between humility and confidence, too – and we show up for our selves as the brave imaginative warriors that we are.

We have a plan, or, better said, we develop a blueprint.

We co-create that karmic blueprint with the universe.

So, determination and repetition are essential to help ground our intention and create updated neural pathways to energise our blueprint.

That process begins once we think differently within our selves.

Once we begin to think differently about our selves, too.

Once we begin to think differently and act differently inside our own homes.

And in our streets and community.

On and off line.

To re-imagine our selves and our lives – and life on Earth for ALL that belongs to it, we first learn to manage our breath and our imagination differently. And the relationship we have with Soul, as well.

Dear Reader, maybe now is a good time to imagine a real name for [your] Soul.

I call mine Neshama, which means Soul in Hebrew, the native language of my first and only spiritual mentor.

Once we understand we are living, conscious energy beings, we accept that we are greater than our physical bodies.

Greater, too, than our mind.

Certainly greater than our ego-persona and her reactive mindset.

Confrontational tactics often tend to backfire or to, at best, prompt ‘the other’ to pay lip service to our demands without actually changing their reactive patterns.

So, beyond outward engagement, a hope-full reimagination of ‘life as we know it’ demands our inner attention, too.

Inner-outer engagement is empowering.

It doesn’t destroy or burn anything.

It doesn’t deride or inflame anyone.

It inspires others.

It is what brave warriors do for themselves.

They do it, too, for the greater good of those who are in her/his line of vision and beyond.

Ah, yes! Whether in anger mode or momentarily at peace with What-Is, one of the things we do well with our minds is … wish.

We spend a lot of time wishing for something good or better to happen.

For our prayers to be answered.

For someone to be different or react differently – including our selves.

Though our neural wiring is similar to that of Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens, ‘wishing’ is probably not a pastime our most ancient ancestors could ‘imagine’.

Too busy, they would have been staying awake and aware in the long string of hazardous moments underfoot that were their lives.

Heads up #4: wishful thinking is a passive, default action.

Real hope for a fundamental shift requires action.

It requires engagement.

Reality check: inner-outer engagement is a calm and purposeful journey that often stretches into whatever remains of our lifetime.

Generating and maintaining inner-outer engagement is an act of courage perpetuated moment after moment.

‘Courage, Courage, Courage!’ called out Edgar A. Guest, the ‘people’s poet’ of the 1950s.

When the burden grows heavy, and rough is the way,

When you falter and slip, and it isn’t your day,

And your best doesn’t measure to what is required,

When you know in your heart that you’re fast growing tired,

With the odds all against you, there’s one thing to do:

That is, call on your courage and see the thing through.

Who battles for victory ventures defeat.

Misfortune is something we all have to meet.

Take the loss with the grace you would take in the gain.

When things go against you, don’t whine or complain;

Just call on your courage and grin if you can.

Though you fail to succeed, do not fail as a man.

There are dark days and stormy, which come to us all,

When about us in ruin our hopes seem to fall.

But stand to whatever you happen to meet—

We must all drink the bitter as well as the sweet.

And the test of your courage is: What do you do

In the hour when reverses are coming to you.

Never changed is the battle by curse or regret,

Though you whimper and whine, still the end must be met

And who fights a good fight, though he struggle in vain,

Shall have many a vict’ry to pay for his pain.

So take your reverses as part of the plan

Which God has devised for creating a man.

At this point, I’m taking the liberty of paraphrasing the poet’s last line.

I’m sure he would have written it differently if he had lived, as we do, in an era of budding equity and prevalent secularism.

Something like ‘Which Soul/God/Mother Earth has devised for creating man, woman – and all that surrounds them,’ might have come to Guest’s mind.

Wise ones tell us that we are currently living through an ‘unprecedented’ evolutionary process.

We-ell, as much as we might want to feel hard done by, we know that there have already been several periods of ‘generalised’ unprecedented times on planet Earth.

It’s just that most didn’t occur in our lifetime – and perhaps not even in that of our parents or grandparents.

Evolution is different from adaptation.

So far, ‘adapt’ is what the human race has done one decade at a time, one generation at a time, if only for the past millennia.

So, when it comes to assessing how truly evolutionary our era is becoming … only time will tell.

Serious and earnest questions: are we in the process of truly evolving beyond another cyclic adaptation of What-Is?

As we endure these Covid-induced’ unprecedented times’, are we slowly evolving to the point of producing measurable emotional and cultural shifts that will benefit us – as well as benefit those nearest and dearest to us – and benefit the world beyond?

Or will we merely keep on adapting to new realities as, generation after generation, humanity has done since the dawn of time?

Assuming we are now awake and aware, dear Reader, what could we create, together and separately, here and now?

What could we ‘grow’ within ourselves that might sustain those near us and those further away, too?

What could we shift once we let go of what we think ‘the world’ thinks of us?

What can we gain and share by gathering our emotional strength from our selves – and from our Soul?

I say: feet planted firmly on the ground, we can reach up, up and up.

We can transcend our limiting insecurities.

We transcend our compromised understanding of what ‘life’ is about.

We cultivate self-love, respect for all that is near and far, seen and unseen and acceptance, too, of each moment underfoot.

In doing so, we cultivate trust in infinite possibilities.

And we ‘grow’ our self-confidence.

Together and separately, we can ‘grow’ a star 😊