Sustaining Your Belief
Have you ever feel like you had it, and then you lost it? Or that you were doing so well and then it was gone? Or maybe it just trickled out so slowly you never even realized you were losing it? Sometimes it seeps away and it can be lost for a long time – until you find it again.
“It” can represent any number of things - something you are doing, something you are committed to, or something you are feeling - but in the end, those things will all point to what you believe in. You can’t hold on to what you believe in (especially when the world is telling you to “let it go”) but you can sustain it. And that’s slightly different.
Your desire and ability to sustain can be applied to a good habit, a discipline, an endurance feat, love, a goal - you name it. But what is sustaining the energy that is required to continue the ‘something’? What is it you are really trying to sustain? Your belief. Everything else funnels down from that.
Your belief is a knowing sense of certainty. It’s an arrival feeling of coming home, and you can consciously let that sense flow into every area of your life, affecting your very perception and attitude of how you see and understand the world and your place in it. Your beliefs are in those moments, those days, those years when you feel alive and awake and on purpose. And then there are the times when a crisis or a karmic challenge occurs, causing you to doubt, to question, to let go. And you lose it.
For some of you, losing the plot can leave you in a depressed state as you sink into a feeling of disconnection, and remain there. Others may go into panic and anxiety, disconnected as well but feeling the pain of it. Some go into distraction, drama or addiction, attempting to fill the void that’s been left because of the disconnection. The world may be perceived as a frightening and ungrounded place then, so you may find yourself running around and carelessly gambling with your life and the lives of others. Whatever your reaction, they all lead you further and further away from your original belief which will continue to cultivate disconnection – the inability to sustain your beliefs.
Now the very thing that may have caused you to lose your way is the same thing that stands a chance of re-connecting you. Something may cause you to doubt or question and show you that your disconnection doesn’t work any more. The same intersection, but this time you can turn the opposite way, and get back on the highway again. And this time in order to sustain that direction, you’ll need something other than a crisis or a karmic challenge – for those are the events and experiences that connect or disconnect you. This time you’ll need to go deeper, to an effortless place, beyond the bumps. You won’t need to hold on here, you’ll be free to let go. A subtle difference. This time you need something new. Sustainability requires it. You need a new level: a deeper, more intimate connection to your higher heart.
There are many, many levels of the heart. More than you could ever imagine, (unless you imagine infinite easily). To arrive at a new level of heart opening and to celebrate it, feels as though you have journeyed long, and you have been challenged through much, and you have now exhaled and can look back and see those challenges, those potholes and bumps, and can love them for all they have brought you. You can squeeze every ounce of love out of them for providing you with such an amazing ride. You can love them objectively and even more importantly, you can love them subjectively – intimately - as your greatest teachers. You can love the crisis, the chaos, the pain and even death if you want. You can see these things as more than the judgment of them. You can go deeper and open that level of the heart even more. This heart connection feels different from what you have ever experienced, because you’re different now.
And this is how you sustain your beliefs. You have learnt from your loss; you have learnt from your gain. And you see there is no difference. You have experienced it all – connection and disconnection – and know it for what it really is.
Jonni's writings have appeared in The Common Ground, The Good Life in Vancouver, First Lines, The Intuitive Connections Network, The Good Life Connoisseur, Planning For Profit, Burnaby Now and other local and national publications.
