Something got named in our room this week. It arrived because I said something a Member disagreed with.
I’d mentioned where I’ve got to in relationship to the body. I’m fifty-three years old, have reduced incidents of pain, and I take no supplements at all. Zero. I’m also less precious than I once was about organic food and similar things. The reason isn’t discipline. It’s that I’ve been letting go of the belief that something has to be a certain way for me to be okay. If I need a supplement, then that supplement is telling me I’m not complete as I am.
A Member came straight back with a question. Why are you wearing glasses?
I told him I’m not perfect, that I’m a work in progress the same as he is, and that I let go of what I can when I can. He had more questions. Do you go to the gym? I do, while I believe I need to. I know the day is coming when I will stop, and because I’m ready to.
That’s where the phrase turned up – Honour thy beliefs. If you believe you need to work out, then work out, because if you don’t it will likely be bad for you. If at a deep level you believe you need glasses to see, then wear them, because otherwise you won’t see. The belief is doing real work while it’s there, and prising it away by force achieves nothing.
He wasn’t finished, and his objection was a good one. By that logic, he said, you’d let go of the belief that you need food. But you do need food, and healthy food is better. What I was describing sounded to him like perfection, and his view is that perfection isn’t available to us in this life.
I agreed with the direction of it and offered a different pace. None of this requires a huge jump. Nobody has to get everything at once. The question is only whether we can move the needle a little and see what it looks like, and the answer is, that it looks a bit different. That’s all. The closer we get to the understanding, the freer we are, because we start noticing how many things we were certain we needed, which we don’t.
Another Member described the bridge that took him into this territory in the first place, which was the recognition that thought reaches the body. If he dwells on a memory of something embarrassing or painful, he feels it physically. He gets the sick feeling in his stomach that goes with shame or awkwardness. His reasoning from there is straightforward. If what he thinks about can do that much at a basic level, it’s reasonable to accept it may do a good deal more in areas he doesn’t yet understand.
He also held both halves of it at once, which was useful for the room. Some of what happens to the body isn’t in our hands, he shared. Genetics and age are what they are, and he described the body plainly as an organic antenna that’s meant to be biodegradable. What is in his hands he takes seriously, so he gives real thought to what he eats, how he sleeps, how he hydrates, and what he allows into his mind. His approach is to make intelligent decisions about the part he can affect and accept the part he can’t, without begrudging any of it.
The same principle showed up in how Members are handling their mindfulness practice, and this may be your experience too. One Member has recognised that he’s spent most of his life in a heightened fright or flight state, ready for action, and he’s about four months into meditating. His decision was to relax his expectations of himself rather than force the pace, on the grounds that four months isn’t going to undo a lifetime of adding to and hypervigilance. He’s also recognised that he does better with a practice that involves doing something more active, because that’s how he’s wired, and he’s found an approach within our Member Portal that fits.
Another Member had been treating meditation as one more item to tick off in the morning, and had started to build a negative feeling around it. The recognition there was that there’s no rule about when it has to happen. Moving it to the evening changed everything. Lying still before sleep, emptying the mind, stopping. The sleep improved, and the improvement is what has made the practice consistent, every night for a fortnight. Which is the same phrase again – Honour thy beliefs. The belief that it had to look a particular way was the thing in the way, and letting go of that was what freed the practice up.
I have a personal long-running example of not honouring what I actually knew in years gone by. Over the years I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing, and much of it didn’t work. What made it frustrating at the time was that these were strategies and people referred to me by others they’d worked well for. It kept happening. Another ten thousand, another twenty, another thirty, and the same result. It wasn’t the strategy and it wasn’t the people. I wasn’t following my greater senses, and I kept taking myself back to the same experience. What matters most in business and in life isn’t the strategy. It’s the quality of the execution, and that depends on how much access we have to our greater senses. With that access we may not even choose the strategy, no matter how good it looks on paper.
So the invitation isn’t to simply strip everything away and see what survives. It’s gentler and more honest. We honour what we currently believe, because while we believe it, it’s true for us. And we stay open to letting go of one thing at a time, at the pace we can actually manage, which is how Members have found the most significant shifts. Each belief we set down is one less condition standing between us and the freedom we seek. Isn’t that the main reason you started your business in the first place?
“Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
