Choice.

There is a deep-down rightness we feel when we are aligned with ourselves.  We aren’t fighting ourselves inside.  We’re not hiding, or giving up.  We’re not numb anymore, or agitated and angry with everything and everybody.  When we’re being our real selves and living fully, we can laugh or weep naturally.  We can extend ourselves in friendship and support, and receive these same things back.  We can stand up for justice, voicing and acting as stewards for ourselves and others.  We can live completely in a quiet afternoon spent in a garden. 

The ways we are “stuck” come complete with habitual postures, gestures, inner unhelpful voices, beliefs and actual neural pathways.  It’s like a path in the forest.  The more we walk along a path, the more deeply beaten it becomes in the forest floor.  We just go that way because we are used to it.  That’s habit, and it keeps us in a pretty small acre of a pretty huge forest.  But when we listen, we can hear a longing for something else, a “What else is there?” voice. 

Rather than remaining in the familiar trance that keeps us on the old path, we can learn to break the bonds of habit.  We can recognize and claim our personal truth.  How to do this?  We learn how to recognize “What else is there?” besides the pain and then step into and live in that richer world.  We make a new way by actively practicing how to claim, hear, see and feel what we want.  We step into our wiser, deeper self – and step onto a more satisfying path.