Saturday 11 February 2012

Wanting what you get is better than trying to get what you want

From a spiritual perspective, we want for nothing.
Materially we might need water or food or other things which, if withdrawn from us, will cause us to die. But from a spiritual perspective, there is always abundance.
Right now, you lack nothing. You lack no insight, no knowledge, no realization – it is all there and available to you.
Because this is it. This is all there is.
How could there be any more?
You have everything you need to make the perfect next step in your life; to solve that sticky relationship that you have always been struggling with; to experience complete union with the divine essence of life.
The only trouble is that we do not believe it. We think that if only I understood this thing, or did not have that pain, or could travel to this place, then everything would be perfect.
Not true. You have it all now.
We think we have to change. We think we have to be different in order to become whole, to become healed, but we do not.
Each of us has been dealt a hand in our lives, and most of us spend our lives trying to throw in the hand we were given, and get another one.
The thing we never figure out is the fact that the game is fixed. We might only have been dealt a pair of fives, however in the game we are playing, a pair of fives is a winning hand. Because the game is set by the same essence of life that dealt us our hands in the first place.
We look at what others have, and we say – “If only I had wealth and fame, then I would be able to have everything I wanted.”
And yet that is almost always not true.
You might have been given a hand where the ultimate spiritual and emotional fulfilment in your life comes from being exactly who you are and where you are.
In fact you are the only person who would be able to be content in the situation that you are in, because that is how life works.
I am not saying that one should not strive to get on and achieve, to go for excellence, and generally to try and make the best out of our lives. We should all do that. What I am saying is that we should play to the hand we have been dealt, knowing and trusting that it is a winning hand, and if we play it correctly we will get our heart’s desire.
As Khalil Gibran says “accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields. And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.”
It is all here and available, right now. The rest is what you think about it.
Real transformation comes when you see ‘what is’ for what it is. That pain is just pain, and joy is joy. They are different. It is about wanting what you get, rather than trying to get what you want. And when you do that you trust life. You trust the hand you have been dealt. You trust your ability to play that hand, and you make no pre-judgements about the way the game is going. You are not running the game; life is running it.
Work with your life and you have everything you need. The moment you try to take over the game, to change your hand, to change the game, you are lost – because it is not your game, you are a part of a bigger game being played by life.