Allow Yourself to Believe

~by Shirl

I like the metaphor of the crawdads in the bucket. . .in a bucket full of crawdads if anyone of them is able to climb up and is within striking distance of getting out of the bucket, the rest of the crawdads will pull them back down.

The conventional wisdom in our culture is to do everything possible to dissuade someone with dreams of soaring beyond the "ordinary" or "acceptable" by any means possible. Others do not encourage or assist you in your dreams, usually. They want to keep you in the bucket.

As I see it, most people are so frightened of being "different", so frightened of the thing called "failure," that they sit at the bottom of the mountain and feel helpless, unfulfilled, alone, and disillusioned. Dr Wayne Dyer gives a great illustration about this. Think back to your days as a small child. For most of us, we were encouraged to take our first steps, to form words, to make sentences from words, to try new things. We were constantly told we could do it and supported and endlessly encouraged to do "it." Of course you can learn to ride a bicycle. . .just keep trying. . .etc. Then somewhere about 8,9 or 10 years old there is a sudden and abrupt change. Very suddenly it seems, we are told we cannot reach out for this or that, we musn't have big dreams, we can't do things beyond the ordinary and acceptable. As we grow into our teen years this reinforcement of "can't" becomes stronger and stronger. So we are trained into our belief system of what we can or cannot do.

I think family, friends and the others in our lives mean well. They want to protect us from possible painful experiences. They want us not to be disappointed or to get "hurt." But in truth, that is what experience is about. When we reach out to experience life we then have the opportunity to choose how we will perceive the experiences, and what we will choose to do with the results.

To really LIVE life, you must participate, and the more whole-heartedly you are willing to participate the greater the experience will be. There is nothing wrong about any of these experiences. We may have hoped for a different outcome, but it is not wrong that we didn't experience it the way we had hoped.

If we can get ourselves to a place where we let go of our expectations, have no agenda other than to experience the experience and fill it with our intent that it directs us to a higher and better version of self, then we begin to see how life can be a constant joy.

There is also the understanding that it is okay to change your mind. I know I personally got a lot of negative feed back from others when I changed my mind about things. But there is nothing wrong with that. Each person holds what they think is the "right" way to progress through life and many tie themselves securely to the conventional wisdom of the times. It is a very limiting way to live.

Dreams may be small or apparently impossibly large, but nothing is created or manifested in our lives that we don't first hold within our thoughts as potential. So dream, and continue to dream, and intersperse your own wisdom and knowledge within those dreams.

Blessings and hugs
Shirl