Spiritual Rule-Breaking - When "what's blocking you?" blocks you

Have you ever worked too hard, pushed at yourself to be better, and found yourself miserable? I have.

That's when "What's blocking you?" just feels like another moment of more pushing, and no allowing. And allowing is the lane change our world is inviting us to take.

I am a leader, but I am not a controller of other people - much as I would love to be, in my egoistic moments of thinking I Know All. You know what I mean, I'm sure. I'm not alone in this insanity. So here I am, a leader, and what I need to understand most of all is how to allow. Guide, yes. Control, no. And allow, most of all.

This lane change is both subtle and inexpressibly large. It has taken me many years to even begin to turn my wheel, and that's not for lack of trying. As women, as leaders, as human beings, our lives completely shift when we do.

I was scrolling through Facebook today and I saw a course advertised by a famous man promising to help you allow your dreams to come on through by "clearing" the "blockages". And I couldn't just leave that there. I had to write this post because I have experienced the other side of "clearing": the self-punishment of clinging to this idea that there is a "something" of myself that is not-okay and that needs to be regarded as negative and undesirable. That viewpoint has been painful, and I think that on the whole it needs to be confronted and questioned.

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The two mental, internal settings we have as women and as leaders are:  

• Something is wrong with me and I need to be fixed in order to be useful, worthy, lovable
• Some things are oh-so-right with me, and will grow when I invite, focus on, and nurture them.

Why on earth should it be so difficult to exchange the first for the second?

​The social rules tell us to work harder, push harder, drive ourselves, make it work, go for the gold.

But what if that is all you have ever done, and it hasn't helped you at all? While you have pushed and pushed, you have seen other people sprint past you without lifting more than a finger, and you have responded by pushing even more?

​As I've intimated, that was me.

At that point, "what's blocking you" becomes just one more injunction to work still harder to figure out what's wrong, and fix it! Friends told me I was being too hard on myself, but I couldn't see it, and I didn't know how to stop.

The things we miss are those things that are just too close to our faces. I was missing something obvious.

​What I was missing was how I felt​, and I was also missing modes of lovingkindness and allowing which make way for those feelings to roll through my being like rainclouds and thunder and rain, like beauty and love and mercy! And that is what most of us are missing: this sense of caring deeply about what we feel, and what that means for our choices and our quality of life.

What this mysterious thing, quality of life, does for us is give meaning and deep satisfaction to moments in every day that we live. It makes it all "worth it", to put it with a little more vernacular.

It seems to me an unavoidable truth that it is our relationship to any aspect of life - where we stand in relationship to any given aspect - that says whether it serves us, feeds us, starves us or punishes us.

If I look at "what's blocking me" with a relationship to that problem of distaste and revulsion, I will not be inviting in the true, deep freedom I seek: the freedom to grow without having to be the person who "makes" it happen.

If, on the other hand, I stand in relationship to those so-called blockages as a friend to a small child whose voice has gone too long unheard, then I am not trying to throw the baby out in order to get what I want but am instead nurturing myself as a way of softening and of allowing those mysterious healing waters to flow as they will, taking me with them.