Life Is Messy

Life is messy. It can't be controlled because it's bigger than us. Life is unpredictable. It's a mystery and it's filled with a tremendous variety of experiences. And we're not separate from life. Life breathes us and beats our hearts. Life takes care of us.

Transcript

Hi,

This is Brooks.

Thank you for joining me.

I'm glad you're here.

Today's class is called Life is Messy.

I guess you could add on to that.

Life is messy and you can't control it.

I say that because there's a part of us that imagines how things can be perfect.

Conceptually we can have these ideals.

I can imagine these are the things I should do to have a really good life.

Or these are the things that should happen in life for things to be really good.

And because we can think it,

We think we can make it happen.

There's a part of us that feels like,

I can control this.

But all you have to do is be alive up till this moment to realize when you look back at your life with some curiosity and honesty.

You can see there's been plenty of times where I wanted certain things to happen,

But other things happened.

Many times.

Yet still there could be this part of us that's,

You know,

I want to control it.

I want to order my life.

I want to balance it all out.

Balance my life.

And that's,

You know,

There's that thought,

Of course,

Right?

Sometimes we have that thought.

Because it seems like that would be a really great thing.

But then again we look at how life works.

And it's like trying to wrestle the ocean basically.

Life is vast.

Life is bigger than we could ever imagine.

It's unfigureable.

It's perplexing.

It's a mystery.

And when we start to consider that,

It can make us feel humble.

It can help diminish that desire to want to control,

To manifest,

You know.

Manifest just the good things and not the bad things,

You know.

Like if I could just take,

You know,

If I could harness,

Control God's energy,

And use my mind to do it,

My life will be unlimited with wonderful things.

But again,

It's like trying to wrestle the ocean.

And it's frustrating.

You can think like,

I should be able to do this.

There's that book,

The Secret.

The book,

Secret told me I should be able to do this.

There's all these courses on manifesting.

They said,

All I have to do is believe it enough and then I'll get what I want.

And I tried all those things.

And I can't make it happen.

I must be doing it wrong,

You know.

That's the frustration.

What really helps is to take a curious look at life.

Not to wrangle it,

But to look at it.

Curiosity means openness.

Open-minded means leaving behind our preconceptions.

It means looking at life,

Taking it in.

Get a feeling for it.

What is life?

And what's my role in life?

Am I separate from life?

Or am I a part of life?

When I look back at my life,

I can see thoughts coming and going.

Thoughts come and go.

They come out of nowhere.

There's a thought to do something.

Sometimes I'll get behind that thought.

Oh yeah,

I want to create this whatever it is.

Sometimes it happens,

Sometimes it doesn't happen.

That's interesting.

I don't create my thoughts.

They come out of nowhere.

Sometimes I follow particular ones.

I take action.

And sometimes things go my way.

And sometimes they don't.

Sometimes I get frustrated when they don't go my way.

I think they should have gone my way.

And it just doesn't make me feel good.

It makes me feel lousy.

Like I should be able to do this and I can't.

It's an example of investigation and looking at life.

So perhaps life is bigger than us.

Perhaps we're part of life.

Like a wave in an ocean.

A wave is part of the ocean.

It's not separate from the ocean.

It would certainly be frustrating for a wave to,

Not like what the other waves around it are doing,

Are not like the way it happens to be flowing.

And try to force the entire ocean to follow.

It's desires.

That would be really frustrating,

Right?

So it's that curiosity about what is life.

And the energy behind life.

And we can be very humbling,

Very quickly to notice,

I'm breathing but I'm not doing the breathing.

I'm being breathed.

My body naturally draws in a breath.

It naturally lets out a breath.

My heart's beating.

I don't have to make that happen.

The heart takes that oxygen-rich blood that the lungs have naturally and spontaneously drawn in,

It takes that and disseminates it through the entire vascular system,

The veins and the capillaries through the entire body.

So that we're able to experience life.

It's a very profound example of life that's constantly happening.

If these natural spontaneously occurring things didn't happen,

We wouldn't be experiencing life.

So when we look at it,

We can see I'm being lived.

Life is living me.

Life is giving me the gift of life.

My greatest possession.

Without it,

I'm not here.

Nothing that isn't my life is here anymore.

Life does this for us.

Life encompasses everything,

Everything in the universe.

The rotation of planets around the sun,

Creation of stars.

Everything's made of vibrating particles,

Molecules,

That don't follow repeating patterns.

And we're made of those molecules.

And they have a vibratory aspect,

Which is vitality,

Which is what life is.

Life is vitality.

And movement is change.

Life is bigger than us.

Life gives us the gift of experiencing it.

And I say life is messy,

Like I said at the beginning.

Life is messy,

Which means life does what it does.

The future's unknown.

And that can be scary sometimes.

I don't want to think that the future's unknown.

I want to have a hand in this.

I want to be able to influence the outcome of things.

It's natural to think that,

Because we're built to protect ourselves.

We want to make sure that we stay alive,

That we don't get injured.

So it's natural to think like,

Oh,

Yeah,

I want to be a part of this.

When we step back and we notice that we're breathed and that our heart beats on its own,

And the blood flows through our body on its own,

And thoughts show up out of nowhere.

We don't know what our next thought's going to be.

So thoughts show up on their own.

So life is messy.

But messy just means it's unfigureable.

It's a creative intelligence that's beyond our knowing.

Based on our nervous systems,

We can only know what's happening in front of us.

We can only know our small environment.

And to some extent,

We don't even know it totally.

The way our nervous systems are built,

We can only take in so much information of what's happening around us.

It's really a small percentage of what's actually happening around us.

If we tried to take everything that was happening around us in,

Our brains would fry.

I mean,

It's not even possible.

So it can be humbling to notice how we operate and how life operates through us.

And how sometimes we have ideas of how we think life should be.

But that's all based on what's already happened.

It's based on the experiences we've already had.

And the concepts that,

The information that we've taken in.

It's all based on the past.

So it's very limited.

But when we consider life's vastness,

The same energy that creates suns and rotates planets around the sun,

Is breathing me,

Is beating my heart,

Then perhaps we lose that desire to wrangle life because we realize that we're part of life.

We're not separate from it.

And life knows us better than we know ourselves.

And we can look back at our lives and think of a handful,

At least a handful of things that happened to us that we never thought this is something I wanted to have happen.

But it happened and it changed our life in a positive way.

Even if it was uncomfortable at some point.

The further outcome of it was our life was the better for it.

So really it's a trust of,

Trust of life.

But that's very possible because life is breathing us and life is beating our hearts.

And we trust that to happen.

We don't think like,

Oh,

Life just decides to stop breathing me or stop beating my heart.

Like,

That never comes up,

You know.

So we notice this spontaneously naturally occurring process going on within us.

And it can help us to trust life.

That life has our best interests at heart.

And knows our needs better than we do.

And suddenly we can become open to what we previously perceived as a mess.

As life is messy.

It becomes life as vast in its varieties.

And it's exciting because you really never know what's going to happen next.

Sometimes it's going to,

We're going to like it,

Sometimes we're not going to like it.

But still there's that excitement.

Because of the curiosity.

Let's see what life's going to bring me.

Let's see what life is going to have me do next,

You know.

And it makes us flexible.

Flexibility.

Trying to control life.

Trying to manifest just particular outcomes.

It's trying to create stability.

But life is not stable.

Life is changed.

And unknown change.

Again,

Looking back at our life we can see that.

We can see the experiences that make that clear.

And life becomes a lot simpler this way.

A lot more peaceful.

So thank you very much for your time and I appreciate you being here.

And take care.

Bye.

Reviews

I love listening to Brooks, he's like a straight talking buddy armed with a terrific sense of humour that lifts me out of self importance, restoring my appreciation for life living through me. Love the part about the waves of the ocean 🤣