Hello,
My name is Lou Redman and welcome.
I so appreciate you taking the time to listen out of everything you can be doing right now.
Your attention is here and that is sacred and I honor it and hold it in that regard.
And today I hope I can say something that might be helpful.
I'm going to be exploring today with you around a topic that I know I struggle with often and many of us struggle with often and that is doubt.
The feeling that we are not doing the right thing or that we should be doing something else.
And this often also might come with a feeling of uncertainty.
And while those two things are different,
I want you to hold the awareness of where either of those are showing up in your life.
And this comes from a personal experience,
Me having doubt on where is the best place to spend my time.
And this is a great problem for me to have right now,
To be honest,
But alas,
We still experience doubt.
I do some work in schools and I do mindfulness work,
I do motivational speaking to high school kids and I have doubt on whether that's actually me serving in my highest gifts because I don't feel the same fulfillment and connection that I feel when I come on here and do talks like this,
When I'm working one-on-one with someone,
When I'm sharing my heart in some way,
I don't get that fulfillment as much in a school environment.
And so I'll just leave it at that because I can continue on that path.
But all that to say I was having doubt and that led me down the exploration of,
Well,
What are we looking for when we have doubt?
And some people might say we're looking for a belief that doubt is not believing that we want to believe.
We want to believe that this is the right thing.
We want to believe that we're on the right path.
And sometimes we can pendulate between these two things,
Right?
I believe I'm doing the right thing.
I doubt I'm doing the right thing.
I believe I'm with the right person.
I doubt if I'm with the right person.
I believe I'm in the right career.
I doubt if I'm in the right career.
And so there's this pendulation.
And what I want to offer is that doubt and belief are both of the mind,
That they are both thoughts.
They are thoughts about a thing.
And so if we are at the level of the mind,
We're making decisions from a very limited view.
And so the top-down approach is to ask you,
How can you shift from doubt belief to knowing?
Knowing is at a deeper,
More embodied level.
An example is the knowing that you can ride a bike.
How do you know that you can ride a bike?
Can you explain that to someone?
And often when faced with that question,
We can.
We just know that we can.
We know what it's like to be on a bike and ride.
And if you don't know how to ride a bike,
You pick something that you do know how to do that's a similar analogy.
So we know how to ride a bike.
And so there's this embodied sense.
We don't have to believe it.
We don't have to believe we can ride a bike.
We know.
And so what I want to invite us to is to come into,
How can we come into a space of knowing?
Of knowing that we are on the right path.
Of knowing that everything is working for us.
And meditation helps us to do that.
Meditation helps us to get quiet so we can quiet the mind chatter.
Because often there might be a part of us that's doubting.
Not the whole thing.
There's this part.
And it might be a hurt part.
It might be a wounded child part.
And so when we can just get quiet and we can come into a state of presence,
We don't need to be swept away by the doubting part.
We can witness it.
And often when we witness it,
We get more awareness and the right action kind of just unfolds from there.
We're not trying to figure anything out.
We are being figured out.
And what happens also when we slow down in meditation is that we open ourselves up to a much greater field of possibilities.
I love the example that Michael Singer uses.
If you were to take a flashlight in a dark room,
That flashlight can only see a specific part of that room.
It doesn't see the whole room.
And he says that that flashlight is like our consciousness.
It's like our awareness.
It doesn't see the whole room.
And so when we slow down,
We open to what are the other possibilities.
Because the wisest thing is that we don't know what we don't know.
And we often try to control our lives based on very limited information.
And so this comes to the backbone of a lot of spirituality,
Which is letting go.
Letting go,
Surrendering,
Trusting the process.
As David White says,
The life you can plan is too small for you to live.
So the fact that we can even conceptualize how we think our life should go so it would make us happy is in essence too small.
That there's actually something greater already planned.
And if we can just let go into that,
Life can just be a lot nicer and smoother and more connecting.
And we can live with more presence,
More generosity,
More kindness,
More love,
More joy,
More meaning.
And a way to allow ourselves to let go is to develop a resourceful,
Not knowing place.
Meaning that we're actually okay not knowing.
And I'm going to share a Rilke poem that speaks to this resourceful,
Not knowing state.
He says,
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
Like locked rooms and like books,
They are written in a very foreign tongue.
Do not seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually,
Without noticing it,
Live along some distant day into the answer.
Can we be okay with the question?
Just the question of what should I do?
Not needing to find the answer.
And when we can live into the questions,
What we do is we open ourselves up to mystery,
To humility,
To wonder,
To awe.
And in that state,
The answers arise in their own time.
So going from the mind to knowing,
Developing a resourceful,
Not knowing state.
And then often what I see is the antidote to doubt,
As it says in the prayer of Saint Francis,
Make me an instrument of peace where there is hatred,
Let me sow love,
Where there is doubt,
Faith.
Where people are doubting,
Can I help them have faith?
And that starts with ourselves.
And that comes back again to that letting go and to trusting,
Trusting that we are supported.
And as one of my friends and teachers,
Ann Sussman says,
It's not only that we have faith in a higher power,
If that's something that is supportive to you,
But we trust that the higher power has faith in us,
That we don't have to get it right,
That we can mess up,
That we could do something shameful or something that we feel like we can't bounce back from,
But we can.
We can always bounce back.
We can always come back in alignment.
It is forever like a GPS.
We just keep rerouting and that's okay.
So this real kindness,
The real forgiveness that we can allow ourselves as we walk our path,
Recognizing that we are just human,
Doing our best that we can.
So cultivating faith.
And a way that I love to think about connecting to ourselves and cultivating a sense of deeper connection is through what Plato called the three transcendentals,
The good,
The true,
And the beautiful.
And so when we are aligned with something that is either good,
True,
Or beautiful,
We are often in a state of presence.
We are often in a state of appreciation.
And so I just,
I love exploring this and invoking this.
I used to lay in the grass when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.
And I would lay in the grass and I would just speak to the heavens and I would say,
Make something beautiful out of me.
Make my life be an expression of beauty and hope that that beauty is felt.
One of my teachers,
David Hawkins,
Would say,
Make your life a prayer.
And that's what being in alignment with the good,
The true,
And the beautiful does,
Is it puts us in the way and realigns.
And so others recognize that in them as we walk our path.
And so I ask you to explore what is the question that you can live into.
Write it down.
Make that your intention,
Not to figure out the answer,
But just pose the question.
What's the next best step for me?
What should I do?
What's this doubt about?
What if I let go?
Whatever the question is for you.
And see if you can live some day,
Some distant day,
Into the answer.
Find what is good,
True,
And beautiful in your life and reconnect with that.
Open to that.
I thank you so much for letting me share with you.
If this is resonating with you and you'd like to do a meditation to explore all those levels that I just talked about,
I have a meditation on here.
It should have the same title,
Just would be in a meditation section.
I encourage you,
If you have the time,
To jump over to that meditation.
There'll be a brief intro for those people who didn't hear this part of the talk,
But I'll go quickly through that so you get to the practice.
Since this was a long talk,
I've separated the meditation portion.
So go find that if you'd like to do a practice or bookmark it so you can do it for later.
What's coming up for you as I share this?
Please feel free to leave a comment.
I love hearing how you're grappling with some of these things that I share.
I invite you to also,
If you're not and you're listening on Insight Timer,
To go ahead and join my circle.
Just search Lew's Circle.
It's a place where I update new meditations that are out.
As always,
Deeply appreciate your valuable time and attention.
I send you so much love.
Namaste.
