We opened this month by writing down an answer to a single question. What do you really want? Not the next milestone or the next result, but the thing underneath all of it. We went around the room and read the answers out, and peace came up again and again. Fulfilment, contentment, freedom, and love too. One Member wrote financial freedom first, then clarity, stability, and purpose, and said that stability was probably peace looked at from a different angle.
Then we asked a second question. What is the fastest way to get there? The answers landed close together again. They included surrender, letting go, following the heart, acceptance rather than trying to change everything, and trusting the process enough to be content now rather than to chase. One Member said willingness. Such wisdom.
When we looked more closely at the Member who had written financial freedom, something surfaced that might be your experience too. I asked what having financial freedom would do for him. He said it would free him from the busy work of the business so that he could spend more of his day doing the things he loves, which for him can be as simple as twenty minutes in a chair in the sun with a podcast. When he heard himself say it, he recognised that the thing he wanted was not the money. It was what he believed the money would allow. The financial freedom had become a condition he placed in front of the thing he was really after, a gate he felt he had to get through before he was allowed the rest. And the thing on the other side of it had been available to him the whole time. What had changed was that he was now giving himself permission.
This is the order we kept coming back to. Who we are comes first, and what we do flows from that. If we are unclear about our purpose in work or in life, it becomes clearer by first recognising who we are, rather than by deciding harder about what to do. Most of us spend our attention on the outer side, the business and the results, on the understanding that the inner state arrives once the outer conditions are arranged or realised. Our room has mostly recognised that it works the other way around.
A good deal of the session was dedicated to the practices that clear the way for that. We checked in on how people start the day, and several described the same habit, which is that the first thought on waking is “Thank you”. One Member has habit-stacked it onto the moment his feet touch the floor. He also keeps a short list on his phone and reads through it each morning. We talked about appreciation and its opposite, which is frustration. At any given moment we are either receiving and appreciating, or resisting and frustrated.
One Member described the work he is doing to catch that shift sooner. He used to notice he had been frustrated only after he had calmed down, sometimes hours later. Now he is closing the gap, working to recognise the frustration at the moment it starts, while the feeling is still there. We put that next to the people we’re aware of who carry a grievance for years, sometimes for decades, and never resolve it. The distance between the event and the letting go can be a lifetime, or it can be minutes. The work is what shortens it. That may be your experience too.
Meditation came up in the same way. One Member said he finds it easy to meditate when he already feels good, and difficult on the nights he is stressed and his mind is racing, which is exactly when he suspects he needs it most. What we looked at is that the difficulty felt is the recognition of an opportunity for growth. When we are low, the part of us that resists has more influence, and going ahead and meditating anyway is the win. When we are already settled or feel good, we are guided there more easily. The times that it feels pointless are the times that make the biggest difference.
One Member spoke about a shift in his relationship with time. He described sitting in the sun for half an hour and absorbing the warmth, and recognising that this now feels as worthwhile as anything else he might do with the time. He put it as the difference between what his ego says he must do and what he simply chooses to do. He has stretched himself through success, through money, and through loss over the years, and his sense of it now is that those stages were all worth having, in part because they showed him the achievement was never the answer he had taken it to be.
Another Member had just had the biggest month his business has seen, and said that alongside it he feels frustrated at not getting as much done as he wants in the hours he has. He recognised the cause, which is that he had taken on a large amount and kept trying to add more to it. It is a common belief that getting more done will make life better, and most of us have believed that at some point. Years ago I worked at a hundred things at once, and one of the changes I am most glad of since is narrowing that down to one thing at a time done well and without pressure.
Which brings us back to where we started. We said that we wanted peace and the likes, and the fastest way there was to let go of everything that’s not that. The outer conditions we chase are a gate we build in front of the thing we already want, and the thing itself is nearer than the gate. It’s available here and now.
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
