Welcome to day 12 of Developing Resilience.
It was said the one who plants trees knowing he will never sit in their shade has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Sit quietly for a few minutes and observe yourself.
Ask yourself,
Who am I?
Ignore all the internal chatter and any emotional waves that may pass through you and just notice.
Observe,
Become aware,
Self aware.
You may notice two things.
One is yourself,
Not as an object,
But as a being that exists.
Simply existence.
Pure awareness.
Just nothing more.
Notice how everything and everyone in your life comes and goes,
But you always remain.
Notice how anything that you place after the words I am,
Like a doctor or American or bold,
Are not what you are.
They may describe where you are or what you do,
But not what you are.
And you may also notice the primary and natural impulse of the being that you are,
Is to create a connection with others.
This is of course the primary impulse of love.
And so you may notice that you exist to be,
To be what you are,
Which is a source of love.
Now ask yourself,
What is the meaning of my life?
Does love need to have a meaning?
Do you generate thoughts and actions with the purpose of connecting to others?
In rekindling the flame of your own heart,
The real meaning and significance of the principle of what you give is what you get comes to life.
To give love is to free yourself from wanting love.
You get back something.
There is a reward,
But not from others.
It arrives as an inner reward called freedom from desire,
Neediness and dependency.
As a consequence,
All your emotional addictions and anxieties start to disappear.
The insecurity arising from the possibility of not getting others' approval,
Acceptance or appreciation dissolves to be replaced by the ultimate security,
Which arises out of the realization that you are love.
Then ask yourself,
Where do you have opportunities to cultivate more of this feeling of meaning in your daily life?
To act in alignment with what brings you meaning is to clean and heal yourself from an old and often subtle craving.
And then whatever comes back from the other,
Be it acceptance or rejection,
It is unable to inject you with the feeling too high or too low about yourself.
To fully understand the meaning of life,
You first need to understand death.
Death has to be one of the most important elements of life,
For it is an event that puts the whole meaning of life into question.
You may be occupied with purposeful activities,
With getting tasks accomplished,
Work completed and then along comes the phenomenon of death,
Whether it's your final death or one of the many deaths through which you go day by day.
And death confronts you with the fact that purpose is not enough.
You live by meaning.
When you come close to death and all purpose slips out of your hands,
When you can no longer manipulate and control things to achieve specific goals,
Can your life still be meaningful?
You tend to equate purpose with meaning,
And when purpose is taken away,
You stand there without meaning.
So there is a challenge.
How when all purpose comes to an end,
Can there still be meaning?
It isn't primarily a practice of thinking about one's last hour or of death as a physical phenomenon.
It is a seeing of every moment of life against the horizon of death and a challenge to incorporate the awareness of dying into every moment so as to become more fully alive.
So see your life as far ahead into the future as you possibly can against the horizon of death.
How do you feel right now?
Thank you.
Join me tomorrow for a meditation on affirmations for inner strength.
Until then,
Be well.
