The Boat and the Helicopter
El bote y el helicóptero
A question about trusting life to provide while pursuing a new professional path, and the creative middle ground between passive waiting and automatic doing.
The Boat and the Helicopter
A question about trusting life to provide while pursuing a new professional path, and the creative middle ground between passive waiting and automatic doing.
Our experiences are somehow leading us to more love and lessons and hopefully back to ourselves, so we can't negate the journey, the human journey and everything that's arising.
The middle way between the waking up and the growing up, when neither is denied, when neither is put above the other: that's where freedom and love is. I run out of words trying to qualify it further.
Because otherwise, we either do a spiritual bypass, which is avoiding life, avoiding the experience of life to try to stay in the spiritual realm, which in that case is very imaginary. Or vice versa, we can do what I would call a psychological bypass, where we overlook what can be called the open secret, the waking up, trying to get to it in the future. "If I do these meditations, if I do these practices, if I do these things, then I will get to this thing that people are talking about, which is waking up, enlightenment." No.
From a place of non-grasping, non-attachment, and keeping in mind the truths of life and what I actually am, there's no conflict there. There's no clash.
The best way I have to point to how to approach life is this question: what do I most deeply want? Or, what does life want as me? What does the universe want as me?
The trick of deep desire
The trick is that I could think something is a deep desire and it's not. In fact, one should assume that when a desire feels like a deep, real thing, it's possibly not so. There's a discipline of not going into belief too quickly.
For example, I could feel like what the universe wants as me, what life wants, is to go on a trip to India, and it feels like this really big, compelling thing. But it might actually be a massive avoidance of some responsibility that I have. It could feel like the biggest, most important thing, the thing I want the most. That's why this is the work of life and how we live. We get into the mind, the psychology, the conditioning that makes these appearances so real. "I really want this thing," and it's actually an attachment or an egoic need. But maybe going to India is the thing. So how do you know?
The only way we know is through experience, trial and error. Going for what we want and then realizing we hit a wall, looking back in hindsight and seeing that it wasn't the best choice or wasn't the deepest thing. And then we can learn from that.
In this particular situation, I feel like it's pretty clear that this is something I'm meant to do, because everything I was doing before was just draining me. It was an environment that wasn't so healthy. I felt like I wanted more and had more to share. I've had some wins here and there. I'm not questioning if this is the right path. But I guess there's part of me that isn't fully trusting that I will be taken care of. I know that, and I don't really feel fear. I still feel really grateful, and that's really lasting in me. There's not a lot of intense or even moderate fear coming up, but I am just thinking: something has to change, something has to get moving. How can I help to support that?
So there's a sense of urgency.
Yeah, because I need money. I have a two-bedroom apartment and I'm using the larger room for my work. It's expensive here in Vancouver. I've gone all in on this, but I guess there is a natural urgency just from a practical, responsibility standpoint. I still have time; maybe something could change.
Urgency as a calling
That sense of urgency is a calling. That's the thing that could often be overlooked and denied, or that we try to make okay through an approach of just accepting what's happening. But real acceptance is always already happening; it can't be fabricated. Real surrender, you can't do it. What maybe needs to be accepted at the more personal level is: I need to activate. I need to do something about the situation.
Obviously you're already doing something; you're making a change. But then what can you do that brings up the activation in the world to address the situation? What is it that you can do? Put all your energy there, because that's not in opposition to spiritual work. It's not in opposition to awakening. They're completely the same thing.
I feel like I am doing as much as I can. I'm doing social media, networking, volunteering, talking to people, putting up posters. Then I thought maybe I could support this with abundance practices: feeling the abundance, feeling gratitude for it, receiving it, creating that emotional vibration in your body along with visualization and thought to help support the business.
That could have some effect. But what I would recommend, hearing you, is to try to use your imagination, your creative aspects of thought in the world. What could you do that you're not doing?
Expanding the range of possibilities
Maybe there are things you have an automatic "no" to. "I wouldn't do this thing or that thing. The solution has to go through this way and not that way." What I'm talking about is: what could you do that would alleviate or address this urgency through action in the world? I'm not saying anything against what those abundance teachings offer, because that can have a real effect. But if the energy is put there more than into acting in the world, and if the action in the world operates within a somewhat limited imagination (not because you have a limited imagination, but because the energy hasn't been put toward imagining more possibilities), then you can get stuck.
That's how the conditioned mind works. When I consider what I could do, the mind goes: "Well, there are these four options." But actually there are infinite options. So you need to put some time into contemplating: what's the fifth option? What's the sixth? Then you'll start meeting responses like: "Oh no, that's not real. I wouldn't do that. This isn't what I want. This won't work." You'll start meeting the resistances in your emotional and mental space. "Not this, not this, not this; it has to be through this other path."
I'm saying this just as an approach, not that this is what will specifically be the way for you. I'm generalizing from what you're sharing. That's how I would approach the situation. Are there ways in which you could do something for money quite quickly and immediately to address the urgency, but you're just not considering them?
I'll have to think about that. I definitely am doing as much as I'm aware of, but I guess I could get more creative. The thing is, I don't want to get another job. I don't want to do anything else. I want to really just focus on this. But maybe I could do something part-time. I don't want to be idealistic about it, but I also want to trust that the universe is going to support me, because I feel like I am doing everything to the highest integrity. I guess I need to be patient too.
Learning to listen, trust, and obey
I'm going to do something really subtle and specific here, and it's not about you doing anything wrong. It has to do with learning. All of us learn and have an opportunity to learn in life, and the learning never ends; it's infinite. Being supported is also a learning. It's learning how to listen, and in a sense, obey. I use the word "obey" a little provocatively, but it's also where trust is developed. Do you recognize what I mean?
When you felt this calling to make a professional change and you went for it, there was an obedience to that calling. To whatever degree, there was a listening, an obeying, a trusting. But that's on a very large scale: "Okay, I'm going this way now. I'm going to listen to this, because it's a big change." Then we need to get more refined in how to listen, trust, and obey. Listen, trust, and obey. Listen, trust, and obey. Until at a certain point, it's no longer the universe or life supporting me. There is no difference. The obedience and the listening and the trusting is life through me, as me.
But at first it's: I have a calling, I try that. I think that's where you're at, and I think that's great. But then there's a risk where we have an idea about how life should support us.
The parable of the flood
There's a teaching that has become a bit of a joke. A man is in a town and there's a flood. He goes up to the attic and starts praying for God to help him. A man comes by on a boat and tells him to get on. He says, "No, no, God's going to support me. I'm waiting for God." The man in the boat leaves. Then a helicopter comes, and again he refuses. He ends up drowning, goes up to heaven, and says, "What happened? God, you were supposed to support me." And God says, "I sent you a helicopter. I sent you a boat. I sent you all of these things, and you didn't listen."
It's ridiculing this tendency, but it's actually really profound. If you take it to a much more subtle level, that's the risk of not really listening and obeying. The man didn't want to get on a boat. The boat wasn't the right solution in his mind. There was an idea that support was going to come in a different form.
That's why I'm talking about open-mindedness and creativity. What other possibilities of co-creativity with life might emerge if you open your mind? "Oh, that actually is a path here. These are more options I haven't considered."
So the question is: what are the boat and the helicopter in your case right now? It's never as obvious and clear as it is in the story; that's the funny part. In reality, it's more hidden, more subtle. It requires a co-creative process where you engage, explore, listen, risk, and trust. And always there's a learning.
I guess the only thing I can think of is to take out a loan and hire a business coach or something.
What I'm proposing is for you to take some time, not to come up with an answer right now, but to take time, even as a practice. A few times every day, consider this. Because right now you had one thought, one possibility. Note that, but there's more. Your creativity is way beyond that.
Could it even be an issue of something I'm not doing, and just being more patient, more open to receive? Like I just need to wait and trust if I can't think of anything else? I'm naturally more comfortable in the masculine energy of doing, and I know there's more room to develop in me around waiting and trusting.
Co-creativity: the middle way
What I'm describing is creativity, and I wouldn't qualify it as masculine. If anything, it's the marriage of both the masculine and the feminine. The creativity I'm talking about is pure imagination. It's like daydreaming, but daydreaming with an intention of exploring. It really is creativity with life.
The word that resonates for me is co-creativity, because there is a dance of two energies that are one. They manifest as two energies intertwined, like the yin and yang. That's masculine and feminine, but it's also the human body-mind and the universe. It's one energy, inseparable, but it operates as an intertwined system with two aspects. That's where it's co-creative: this dance between the universe and the wanting, and the creativity of that, and what feels like what I want. The more that dance becomes connected and smooth, the more it becomes the one desire, the one wanting. That's where things start to have synchronicities, where things become serendipitous and good. We all experience this; it's always there.
So what I'm talking about is not necessarily either just sitting and being patient, nor doing, doing, doing. It's what's in the middle. Not just acting from an automatic pattern of how you've done things in the past, which got you this far but maybe has limits. And not just sitting and waiting. I'm not saying you're doing either of those. I'm saying the mind will tend to try to resolve things into "it's this or it's that," but the real question is: what's in the middle? For me, that's where this creativity lives, imagining options, possibilities. It's not just "I could do this thing and take these actions." It's asking: what is it that can be manifested in the world? It's not a passive thing. It's a creative, passive-active process.
That resonates. Thank you.