Frozen in the face of Decision

On the precipice of a big decision she’s frozen herself. 

She knows, in her heart, what she wants to do.  She knows what is in most alignment with her truth.  But her mind is strong and she keeps thinking her way out of it.  She is intimately woven into relationships through her roles and responsibilities, through the commitments she’s made through the years.  And she does not take these lightly.  

So her mind thinks her out of the decision over and over again - worried about the impact it will have on those she most loves, and of course about what strangers might say.  She worries most of all that this decision won’t be the right one. It won’t give her what she wants.  She thinks herself out of it because there are no guarantees.  

It’s probably going to be messy.  Well, that’s to say, it could be messy.  It might not be.  The more you cling, fight, and insist the messier things tend to be.  And big choices rarely come without some growing pains.  That’s what she’s really hoping to avoid by continuing to follow her mind around in circles. Maybe she’ll be able to think her way into a solution that honors her Truth and is also painless.

Her mind can’t possibly know the unpredictable beauty that can and does appear when she finally comes into authentic alignment with her Heart.  She hasn’t yet tasted the magic that happens when you let go of control and surrender to the greater flow of Truth in your life.  This can’t be explained, it can only be lived.  But she’ll need to live it at least a little before her mind will let her to make this decision.  So she’s going to need to cultivate two new qualities.  

You need them too.

The first is Faith.  Your inner guidance knows at least as much - if not more - than your mind/conditioned self does about what’s in alignment for you.  Can you have faith that your Heart really truly does know what will bring you greater peace, freedom and capacity to awaken and expand within yourself?  Those qualities are at the center of a deeply present embodiment and they are what your Heart wants for you most of all.  They don’t necessarily come pain-free.  Your Heart can’t promise you painlessness existence.  But it will bring you closer to Truth to freedom to ease.

And the other thing she’ll need along the way is courage.  The courage to leap before the net appears.  The courage to align with your own truth rather than the conditioning that society has given you.  The courage to set aside ‘what if….’ and instead say “Let’s see what happens….”  Then courage to set out knowing there are no guarantees.  The courage to find out that some places along the way will feel worse than you’d ever imagined possible but others will simpler than your little mind could have guessed.

Faith and Courage need to be cultivated.  They’ll help.

What isn’t going to help anymore is hesitation.  What doesn’t help when a decision has loomed for weeks, months, years is over-analysis - rehashing every old story and what if.  What doesn’t help when you’ve looked at the problem logically and from every angle and considered all choices and nothing has become clear is more thinking in the same circles.

So set it aside for a minute.  Step back from the precipice. If you haven’t chosen in the last however many weeks, clearly it’s ok if you take however many more you need. Practice something new.

Listening.

Not thinking.  LISTENING. Not to your mind, but to your Heart. Practice opening your inner ear to that still small voice inside and cultivate your faith and your courage by following it.  

Small moments at first:
What do I want to wear today?

What do I want to order for dinner?

What do I want to practice on my yoga mat?

Ask your heart and let it be your guide again and again and again.

Eventually those small decisions get easier.  Eventually bigger decisions don’t feel so hard.

Slowly, faith in your inner guidance and the courage to act will do something incredible.  They’ll grow into deep self-trust.  

In that moment, when you trust yourself deeply, and know that you’ll be ok no matter what happens, that is the moment to step back to the edge, listen to your heart, and choose.