Hello Love!

Last week I was sharing why not everything that happens to you is ABOUT you or BECAUSE of you. Not everything is a reflection of your vibration or a 'manifestation' of yours.

If you missed it, you can check it out here.

Today I want to dive deeper into how you can find TRUE agency - within what you CAN control, while learning to navigate what you can't.

This is deep, so let's get going!

Assuming EVERYTHING Is About Us Is A Coping Mechanism:

To assume that EVERYTHING is about US is a coping mechanism.

It’s another thing we’ve carried forward with us from childhood when our perspectives and understandings of the world WERE totally self centered.

Where our world DID revolve around us.

Where getting our needs met by our caregivers required that we acted in certain ways in order to elicit certain responses. 

It’s a way of shielding ourselves from the reality that there IS a lot of chaos to this existence. A way of protecting ourselves from the realization that other people have complex histories that have nothing to do with us.

We can simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time and it can dramatically alter our lives - just because someone fell asleep at the wheel. Decided they needed something we had. We can be in the right place at the right time and get something truly amazing for no other reason than we just happened to be there. We can look for the ‘reasons’ and search for the patterns and synchronicities and causes all we want - but sometimes there just isn’t going to be an understanding or ultimate revelation about ‘why’ something was what it was.

It just was.

When I was 16 I got hit by a car. Nothing serious, just a few scratches. The person who hit me - was having a rough day. There was lots going on, they were driving early in the morning and the sun got in their view at just the right moment that they didn’t see me crossing the street. For me, there was nothing special about what I was doing. I was in my normal state. Fully stressed out. Panic walking before my long shift at a super boring job I had to work because I needed food I had to pay for myself. I was crossing the street to put money on my pay-as-you-go cell phone plan so that I could at least sneak off to the bathroom on breaks to text my friend. I had been in this ‘vibration’ for most of my childhood. I had crossed that street a million times before. I’m assuming he had driven this road over and over. It was a coincidence that all of those circumstances lined up as they did. I could have been paying more attention. He could have lifted his head slightly to change how the sun was hitting his eyes. I could have stayed home or left 5 minutes earlier. But what happened was what happened.

It wasn’t a cosmic lesson.

It was a coincidence.

I could have blamed my state - but in this same state, I had also been given the right of way.

I’d been smiled at.

I’d been given a free tea.

Nothing had changed in me. 

There have been times when I was denied legal documents I wanted. Times where I didn’t get into programs I wanted to get into. I did get the job I was going for. Times where, through no fault of my own, I didn’t have the qualifications or capacities to do what I wanted to do. It was because of man made systems that I didn’t have the freedoms I wanted. There were physical limitations in my reality that I didn’t choose, that I was born with, that dictated the way my life went.

AND

There was a time in my life where I continually ‘attracted’ the same kinds of relationships into my life. More accurately, a time in my life where due to my programming, conditioning and circumstances I was only attracted to people who knew how to get their needs met via manipulating and taking advantage of others. I was constantly finding myself in these power dynamics where I was having to mold myself to every changing expectations, and where I had to accept abuse as my fault. This happened to me because of my upbringing which I didn’t choose.

AND.

I had agency within this. I took my power and chose to change MYSELF in ways so that what I was attracted to, what I believed I deserved, what I was willing to tolerate shifted in dramatic enough ways that I no longer wanted to be in relationships with the manipulative types.

I shifted myself in a way that made it so that my experience was different.

It's Not Either Or:

Now again, please know that I’m not saying that we have no agency OR that we CAN’T look for lessons or inspirations in the circumstances we find ourselves in. I’m not saying that there aren’t things that ARE because of us, that ARE a reflection of us. I think it’s incredibly empowering to go through life looking for how each of our experiences have helped inform us about how reality works. I think it’s very powerful to be able to say that everything we go through will be an opportunity to love ourselves a little more, to learn a little about the world around us, and to realize just how big, complex and complicated our world truly is. I believe allowing ourselves to find our power in the places it DOES exist - especially within painful circumstances - is the key to being able to find solutions where solutions may be very hard to find. Is the key to hope in what may appear to be hopeless times. Looking for meaning, looking for our cause and effect relationship with reality, looking for where we have control over the things we’re going through - these are all positive things. 

But it can be taken too far sometimes, and in this we can actually end up just making ourselves feel LESS in control, LESS powerful and more resistant to the realities of life than not. When we OVER assume that EVERYTHING is a reflection of us, this then becomes a superstition. To believe that every long line, every technology failure, every ‘no’ is due to something WE did, is to venture into delusion land. Is to dissociate from real reality and to enter into a self protective mechanism that will become a mental prison. When we are in a state of constantly looking for that pattern/meaning/cause of EVERY little pain and inconvenience - or even every BIG pain and inconvenience - we are going to find that we become more obsessive/compulsive that we become free and mobilized.

We are going to start to get into territory where we’re constantly afraid of our thoughts, trying to PERFECTLY plan our lives around the planets and numbers, where we’re incessantly asking if our alignment/vibration is right, coming into a state of fearing every little shift and change, afraid to take any steps forward, scared of the world around us - because we’re believing in a fantasy that doesn’t exist.

And therefore we can’t actually interact with reality in a practical way. We will lose spontaneity. We will lose our resilience. Our capacity to figure things out as we go. We will get perfectionistic about life and this will trap us. We will stop taking risks, stop going for things, stop allowing ourselves to grieve and be disappointed. We will be in constant self protective mode and this doesn’t feel good.

As with all things, balance in reality is the key.

Learning to differentiate that which IS a reflection of us, that which WAS caused by us, that which we DO have control over vs. those things that are simply much bigger than us, beyond us, out of our control and having nothing to do with us is KEY to actual agency.

Then learning how to navigate the pain, how to process the set backs, how to accept the limitations - THIS is much more practical work than trying to perfect ourselves so that we get everything we want. 

We’re likely never going to get everything we want, nor are we ever going to be pain-free in this life.

Learning to deal with the inevitable pain that comes with being alive - THAT’S freedom. So we can LIVE. Grow. Expand. Experience. THIS is what we actually want.

I know it’s scary to consider the things that we aren’t in control of. I know it’s scary to think that large parts of our lives have been chosen for us. I know it’s hard to comprehend that there may be pain we can’t control. But this is a reality we must learn to embrace if we want actual peace in this life.

Because the truth will always set you free.

Maybe not on the physical level. The truth may be that the government says no. The weather ruined a thing. You got sick. Someone made a bad choice and you were there to be a part of the mess. You may not be able to get what you want. The lesson may be one in learning how to survive, how to get through, how to tolerate what you can’t change. This is a part of reality. And there will be things you CAN control. Things you CAN change. Things you do have power over. Signs and synchronicities and alignments.

Both exist.

So with this, again, it’s not black and white.

It’s not all or nothing.

There is a huge positive benefit in looking for the information and allowing everything to be informative on some level.

AND.

There is also a huge benefit in realizing that some things are just how they are. And rather than driving ourselves nutty looking for the WHY’S - we would be better off looking for how to manage what is, how to support ourselves through what is, to find the agency we DO have within what is - rather than thinking that if we could just ‘figure it out’ we could change what we actually can’t change.

Not everything is about you.

This universe is not human centric.

The world is not ‘you’ centric.

We are a collective of beings all doing our own thing, together. In a universe that’s doing it’s thing.

It’s big.

It’s scary and it’s existential.

And it’s liberating to know that not everything is about you.

So the real question is - how can you best SUPPORT yourself in what is? Look for your power, then look for how to love yourself through the rest?

THAT’S agency.

<3