PLAYING IT SAFE

When we stay in our safety zones where we feel comfortable and secure, we become firmly entrenched in this-is-who-I-am mindset. From this perspective, the worst thing imaginable is change. The structures we’ve put so much time and effort into maintaining would all go away, and that would be terrible.

Yet this happens again and again in varying degrees throughout our lives. When I believe something must stay in its rightful place, exactly as it is, for me to be OK, I have become attached to it; I have confused this external thing with who I am.

If that external thing changes, and eventually everything does, how do you react? If you have placed your sense of self in it, then you have to defend it. You have to argue for it. You have to come up with definitions and meaning. In short, you have created an attachment.

Practice

With awareness, notice that nothing outside you defines who you are. The life force that is you cannot be fulfilled by external objects; only the ego tries to make the finite infinite, and the result is suffering.

With this knowledge, try something new today.

Living a Life of Awareness

~ Don Miguel Ruiz Jr.