Do you know the feeling of buying something you know you actually don’t need or is not going to work for you?
I experienced this last week: with our big grocery shop on Saturday, my husband and I were offered a box of water with a lemon taste. Now we don’t drink much else than water and herbal teas and I felt it probably would not be right for us. Yet there was this little curiosity that was big enough to make me take the free water. It was still in a closed box so I was not able to read the ingredients, nor did I know if it was sweetened artificially. Yet I deep down knew it was not right for us and the chance that it would be water with real lemon juice was very small, as that just does not keep well for long!
At home my husband, also being a bit curious now, opened the box and was excited as it did not contain sugar or sugar substitutes, though it did contain an artificial lemon taste, which unfortunately did not really match natural lemon! We knew we could not drink this as we just simply did not like it.
Now we had another problem: a box with six one litre cartons of water with artificial lemon taste… standing on our bench for a day… and of course it started to annoy me. Yet I sensed more than just the annoyance of it standing on the bench – there was another level to it and that was that it was a totally self-created annoyance. I had already felt to not get the water even though it was free, but I did because I wanted to know for sure and now I had to deal with the consequences of this choice.
This made me ponder on the bigger meaning of life. How often do we create things, issues, troubles etc. in our life we know are actually not needed at all before we create them? And then find ourselves having to deal with the consequences of a choice we made against our natural feelings?
Big ones are:
- Getting angry even though we don’t want to
- Overeating when we know we feel horrible afterwards
- Buying clothes that we don’t really like or don’t feel completely comfortable in
- Extremes such as firing a bullet and creating a war.
In these instances I noticed that there is always a moment that tells you what it is going to be like when you choose the reaction, issue or complication.
When we take a moment we can observe we have chosen something that is not in line with what we feel is true and that we have actually created a problem that was not there before. By doing that we have made the space to decide what to do with it.
A couple of examples:
- Ignore the annoyance and act like it does not annoy us – to do this we have to numb and dull our senses by for instance overeating or eating the wrong foods, entertainment, gaming, being overly social and outgoing etc.
- Not accept our mistake and beat ourselves up for it – which is also a form of dulling and numbing our senses and a way to make life a huge struggle too!
- Accept we made a mistake and created something that shouldn’t have been created – taking responsibility by dealing with the problem now at hand.
In the past I would always be in option 2 before I would even be aware of it! I would react and empty the cartons for sure yet all the time feeling like I shouldn’t have taken them – without giving myself any space or understanding.
This time, because of the understanding of the situation and observing instead of reacting, I chose option 3. We emptied all the cartons and put them out with the special rubbish. Not a big deal but when I accepted my choice to not act on my feelings it was easy to see what to do next: taking responsibility and getting rid of them in a responsible way.
Even though it is a very simple situation and you might think I am complicating it, for me it brought a huge understanding to my reactions and behaviours in many moments in my life. I think the thing we like to ignore the most in life is that we are the creators of our own problems and being confronted with this fact makes the most extreme reactions come out of us if we are not aware of it happening.
The feeling of having created a problem that is not needed (and when are problems needed?) can feel very annoying and we don’t like to feel this. For instance, with the water I was really annoyed with the extra work to be done to get rid of them and the space being taken in our rubbish bin (which is not that big), but I could not go and blame the supermarket or anyone else for it – it was my own choice and that is not always nice to feel.
But I found that actually dealing with the problem from an understanding of the situation, and why I chose what I chose, brings much more lightness to my life than trying to avoid feeling the annoyance.
We can in the end only truly move on when we have dealt with and accepted our past choices.
By Lieke Campbell, 26, Student Dentistry, Belgium
Related Reading:
To Observe and Not Absorb
The Meatball Story
Being Responsible for the Life I Live
Words on Serge Benhayon 
Setting our standards along with the boundaries that are understood makes all the difference to the choices that we are making on a daily basis and as you have shared Lieke, when we ‘truly move on’ or simply focus on True Movement, then life becomes simpler as the way we have moved has aligned us to our Soul and thus we feel the flow of True impulses.
A ‘free’ gift is rarely free of consequence.
We have a choice, to add more complication to the created problem or sitting to observe the situation with a wider perspective. At the end never is about us, but the energy we are in that lead us to make one choice or another.
Accepting my imperfections is supporting me to learn and understand my choices from a very different point of view. The one doesn’t blame or demand but observe with not ounce of judgment. Beating ourselves up serves no one, just delay the possible step is on offer and add more tenssion in our body.
“… when I accepted my choice to not act on my feelings it was easy to see what to do next: taking responsibility and getting rid of them in a responsible way.‘ This is good, it’s accepting that we are perfect, we make errors and getting on with correcting things. I know I can sit in the error for a while and not deal with it, better to be real and constructive, thank you Lieke, great topic.
Accepting the choice allows me to understand why I made it in the first place. Reacting to it ensures I don’t understand and instead judge myself, which doesn’t help any.
Acceptance supports us to align to what is true and reaction is an alignment to what is not true.
“I think the thing we like to ignore the most in life is that we are the creators of our own problems”. I agree, at times I have had such clear awareness of what is behind my behaviours, and at others I’ve been in reaction and blame, instead of responsibility. I also feel your words about understanding are so important, as then we are held in a space to explore and learn, instead of bury or deny the issue or be hard on ourselves.
I love water and very little needs to be added, as is what comes from our essences. Just deepen and appreciate what flows through us from God, or True energetic appreciation of our essences and letting go of the physical including soda waters.
“I think the thing we like to ignore the most in life is that we are the creators of our own problems and being confronted with this fact makes the most extreme reactions come out of us if we are not aware of it happening.” I agree and it is not so easier to swallow this honesty but as you so beautiful described it is worth to do so as it opens us up to what is next step in our lives.
We are and can be our own worst enemy when we battle with our mind and body. Just by entering a battle means we have already lost.
Yes, I can relate to creating problems and then that horrible feeling that I created it and all the ensuing complication, problems and hassle. It has become a finely tuned skill and craft over a long time.
That’s exactly where acceptance and understanding becomes so important, as ever.
Just writing this makes me more aware of the fact that as with all behaviours, I will only stop choosing complication if I accept and understand that I am doing that.
I can also relate to trying to put my head in a dustbin in all manner of ways to avoid dealing with the problem.
As I understand more that life is simple and that I complicate it to get my problems and strife, I also understand that it is as simple as a choice.
Choosing to chastise ourselves for a problem that we created, is an example of creating yet another problem and difficulty.
There is a lot to appreciate in the fact that I am now taking responsibility for my hand in the making of it. There is a tendency to add to the struggle by feeling like we don’t know how to deal with the problem we created. The fact is that, as the creators, we are also the only key holders to doing something about it.
Simplicity is the way of the Soul, whilst complication is the way of the spirit.
Taking a moment to stop, observe and feel is very powerful indeed, for it opens up a whole new way of navigating your way around the day, around the month around life essentially. We do not stop and feel often enough, and so we end up with all these missed opportunities of moments loaded with potential awareness of what is truly needed in each situation.
We spend an inordinate amount of time creating and then dealing with our problems. If we pulled the plug on this self engrossing behaviour then we would all be much freer and it would be easier to feel the truth of who we all are.
So true Alexis, if we weren’t using all of our energy creating problems and then dealing with them we would have to surrender to the enormous tension and strain of holding back the beauty of who we are and simply let it all out.
We have to actively meddle, muddle and complicate things constantly to be able to conjure up the spirit engineered life that we’re all leading because there’s no way in Heaven that our soul would have anything to do with what we’ve currently created here on Earth, it’s a shambles to say the least.
That’s a strong last line – “we can only move on if we have accepted and dealt with the problem”. Otherwise the thoughts of what could have happened, what else we could have done can become over-consuming. We can obsess with things from as little as taking the rubbish out to as big as how to handle a project/ mistake at work. Every occurrence is a lesson or a confirmation, the lessons are not always so obvious but if we look at the situation with an open mind we can often spot it with our heart. I’m this case, one could very easily brush off the situation and say “my lesson is to always follow my gut” but what you’ve expanded on shows that there is always more to learn – i.e we can only move on if we accept and deal with the issue. Thank you Lieke.
Or – could all our problems be self created? … Could life be actually very simple if lived from the impulse of the inner heart, yet we created these super complicated problems to make life look much more difficult and challenging than it actually is?
Great comment Meg, we need to get out of our own way to let life be the simplicity it is when lived from our soul. It’s a truly responsible moment when we can see how much we create our own problems and complications.
What a complicated maneuvering we execute in order to avoid ‘mistakes’ and feeling like we are ‘wrong’. We will never become mistake-free and perfect, and it is not about avoiding making one ever, but accepting all our movements are about learning and there’s constantly more. And the lack of transparency and dishonesty that often get employed in this maneuvering bring even more complication.
If you believe that life is about dealing with problems you then need to constantly create these as otherwise problems would not exist and would life be in a natural flow instead.
Any time we go against our inner knowing we create something that does not belong to he natural order of life and therefore stands out and disturbed us.