Showing posts with label satisfaction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label satisfaction. Show all posts

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Day 257 - Chasing Life Instead of Living Life




What does it mean to ‘chase life’ rather than to ‘live life’?

For me it involved goals: academic goals, relationship goals, location goals, career goals, family goals and so on.

I would create a goal for myself and then figure out a path to get there, and I would walk that path, adjusting along the way. For me, at the time, this was sufficient and the 'right' way to 'fully live life', because I was accomplishing the things I set out to do.

The ‘chasing’ comes in when I would project the goal into the future, and then project ‘who I would be’ when I got there, thinking and believing that my self-experience would change once I accomplished the goal.

The thing is, when I would complete the goal, I would still inevitably be the same person. I would have the same insecurities, the same uncertainties, and I also noticed that new insecurities and uncertainties would open up once the goal was reached, as the habit and pattern of participation into such things in my mind still existed.

It is humbling to look back over the past decade and realize that throughout all my accomplishments, all the effort and hard work, I was missing one huge, important main ingredient: SELF HERE.
I never focused on sinking into my own skin, integrating into my environment, and establishing a foundation of self wherever I was, because I was always moving, changing directions, living places temporarily, keeping only one foot in the present moment and another foot in the future projection: constantly chasing ideas as future goals. 

The consequence of this is that there is little to no SELF (who I am, as I am RIGHT NOW) in the goals, there is only a projected version of ‘who I will become then’, only once I get there, as if the walking of the path and the attaining of the goal was the most important defining action that would shape and create me.

My first reaction to this realization was that I had been doing it all wrong and now I am back at square one, but these actions or elements of the process of self-creation are essential ingredients, and all is not lost. Along the way, I self-introspected, gained self-understanding and awareness, developed skills and qualities that I now have and cannot be taken away. I also gained work experience, degrees, certifications and money, which can serve me now and in the future.

What I was missing was a solid foundation of ‘self here’. Self Here meaning, the understanding and realization that I can be fully whole, fulfilled and present in the Here/Now moment, that I belong here, wherever I am, simply because it is where I have placed myself in awareness. I created a path, and I am walking it – I don’t have to wait to attain something or accomplish anything in order to develop these things, I have everything I need to build my SELF right here and right now, wherein everything that I am not satisfied with or that I want to develop can only happen right here, right now in the present moment wherever I am. And it is not only possible, but rather absolutely essential that I do so, otherwise I will never become the potential I see, because I had placed it in the future, in a job, in a location, at a certain salary and with a certain life.

To be continued in my next blog….

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Do I Look Satisfied? Redefining and Living the Word 'Satisfaction'




 I had a lot of resistance toward writing this blog, so I must be on to something! The word ‘satisfaction’ came up for me in a balancing session with a friend of mine who is practicing for Life Alignment certification. This practice uses muscle communication to bring to one’s awareness information that they are carrying but on some level are not looking at or aware of.

A process I am walking is that of redefining and living words. There is much research coming out recently about the effect the words we speak has on a DNA level, and our ability to reprogram our DNA through sound and the internal environment we create for ourselves. I am not a professional, but I have been practicing working with words for some time now, and have noticed the effect in Who I Am in situations, and the change I am able to bring through when I look at the words I am using and how I am using them. 

In redefining and living words, you take using words to the next level, by looking at how you have subconsciously defined that word over your lifetime, and thus how you are living it out on a day-to-day basis. In the case of this blog, I am looking at the word ‘satisfaction’, so you can see ow this process works by continuing reading here.

Due to the resistance I have felt towards writing this blog, I put it aside for a few weeks as I observed myself and Who I Am within the word ‘satisfaction’. It took time as I let events play out and did ‘self-checks’ in moments to see how I process the outcomes of the events and how I handled the situations as they unfolded. This is what I have learned:

How I have defined and lived the word ‘satisfaction’ throughout my life has been mostly dependent of a feeling: that of feeling ‘satisfied’. What I noticed when I brought this word into my awareness and really looked at it is that I live my life feeling chronically UNsatisfied! Without even consciously being aware of it, I saw that I carry around a feeling over never having done enough, done well enough, or have fallen short in some way that prevents me from feeling satisfied about a completed task, or even the way I am moving forward within a task.

This lack of satisfaction actually plays out in my life where I try to push myself to do too much, to the point of burn out, or I do too little in FEAR OF burning myself out, (leading to more dissatisfaction), because deep down, I KNOW I will never be satisfied! In relationships, this builds up over time causing subtle resentment, frustration and insecurity, seeing the worst in myself and having my faults, mistakes, blunders and weaknesses being, in moments, brought to the forefront of the relationship, causing unnecessary reactions within me that I then have to deal with. If I am not diligent, I can risk to project this onto others, so it is of utmost importance to always bring the point back to self.

This is all because I have based ‘satisfaction’ on a feeling, and not on actual, measurable physical reality, leaving me powerless to direct myself to a point of ‘satisfaction’ within myself, because I am instead at the mercy of the whim of my emotions as they sweep through me.
Not only that, but I also saw a relationship between ‘satisfaction’ and ‘spite’, where I would go into ‘spite’ and then feel ‘satisfied’ when someone else would suffer some consequence that I foresaw, or a consequence I myself have been through and felt satisfied that another was now in it; like a ‘see how that feels?’ – type  vindication. Nasty stuff, I must admit, but to admit it is the most beneficial thing I can do because within understanding there can be forgiveness, and within forgiveness comes change: till here no further, I will no longer accept and allow this behaviour within me.

To see further dimensions of the word ‘satisfaction’, I will place the dictionary’s definition here:

a : the payment through penance of the temporal punishment incurred by a sin
b : reparation for sin that meets the demands of divine justice
2 a : fulfillment of a need or want
b : the quality or state of being satisfied : contentment
c : a source or means of enjoyment : gratification
3 a : compensation for a loss or injury : atonement, restitution
b : the discharge of a legal obligation or claim
4        : convinced assurance or certainty
5        proved to the satisfaction of the court

Within the dictionary definition, I see that elements of justice, religion and a transactional model being brought in. For me, when it comes to human-relationships, I have to ask myself if I see it as best to bring in these elements, or if they are more harmful/destructive when it comes to the creation of a relationship according to one’s choosing.

What about unconditional giving, support, and seeing the best in the other? Must there be payment, reparation, compensation, obligation, vindication and convincing? For me, these words at this time have no place in my relationships.

The words that I see as beneficial, the ones I can therefore accept, allow and live in my actions are ‘fulfillment’, ‘being satisfied’, ‘contentment’, ‘enjoyment’, ‘gratification’ and even ‘proving’.

Now, this does not mean that these new words will automatically and magically become the basis for living ‘satisfaction’, nor does it mean that the other words will simply disappear. This is a process and a blue-print is necessary to be put into place so that it can be practiced in until it becomes the physically integrated living word.

In order to create the blue-print, I will sound the word ‘satisfaction’ to see if a solution exists within the sound.

When I speak the word I hear

Sat Is Fact I On

The solution I see is: the fact is what I sat on

Meaning: imagine completing a task and then sitting down afterwards with that feeling and experience of satisfaction. For me, with the solution I see in the sounding of the word, I can see that in that moment of completing a task, or even during the task, I can take a moment to reflect if I have worked only with the facts (and not the FEELINGS).

In order to extract the facts to work with, I must then define the task and the moment I am walking through. In each moment throughout the day, I can either drift through it with no real or clear direction, or I can define my moments within a structure and goals, giving myself parameters to satisfy.

For example, in this moment I endeavour to write a blog, in that moment my goal is to let go completely of all mental stimulation and simply be present to see what opens up, in another moment I may want to get a few obligations done in a certain time frame, knowing that once complete, I will give myself some time to rest and for self-care.

When I define my moments like this, I can then at any point look to see if I am satisfying the goals I set out for myself. If not, then I can look at why. In this way, instead of feeling ‘unsatisfied’, I can rather focus myself on directing my next moments based on the facts I derived from how I am moving thus far: in this, taking a step outside myself to, for a moment, sit on the facts, reflect, and move from there.

This applies to relationships as well, where I can take a step back at any point to see if there is an issue that needs to be discussed or communicated about, if there is time together for enjoyment required, if I must discipline myself in my time and communicate this to my partner, and always looking at making sure there is a balance between ‘work’ and ‘play’.

Again, looking at the facts instead of the feelings: is my work life and relationship life balanced If not, what must be done? Within my relationship, are there any unresolved issues? If so, what must be communicated? Here looking at taking a moment to step back and sit/observe how am I moving, I remind myself to sit only on the facts, and not move into any form of thinking, interpreting, judgment, expectation or resent, as these are not facts, these are feelings – and they are the feelings that lead to the final feeling of ‘unsatisfied’.

When I look back at the end of some process, event, accomplishment or even moment, I can assess how I walked through it and how I would like to process by looking at the facts I sat on, the decisions I made from there, and the way I moved forward. If I am not satisfied, I simply repeat the process: sit on the facts I objectively observe, and define my next moments with the appropriate correction.

Redefinition of ‘satisfaction’:

A state of having sat on the facts until a situation or event is resolved as best possible.

I will now applying this redefinition to my living application and follow up with an update of how it went.