When you become a mother I think something magical transforms in how you are able to perceive life.  Not one of my children are the same yet, they come from the two same “basic ingredients”.  I think it’s fair to say that this is true of all families.

One of the things I always hear older parents say to younger parents is “Don’t Compare”.  It’s true.  Your second child will be very different than the first and so on.  Because, as the saying goes; everyone is different in their own unique way.  My children have similar likes and dislikes and can “play” together in harmony….on a good day; however, they are definitely NOT the same.

This idea of Just Be hit me hard when I took on the pressure of “potty training”.  Although, now looking back, I don’t know why there is so much pressure? I don’t see too many 7 and 8 year olds with a desire to wear a diaper.  I think we naturally grow out of that phase.

But ask a mom about her experience of trying to potty train a boy who’s not ready to learn… Nightmare.

My children constantly reminded me that Life has a natural flow to it. Just as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, as night follows day, and as the seasons change throughout the year.

And, I realized that being yourself, your true self that nature intended you to be, requires a lot of work.

For most of us, the plan is to have an extraordinary life.  And, why not? Our time in this world is so precious, and brief, it just makes sense to get everything we can out of each day. And then, by building one day upon the next, we can create a life full of meaning.  I want my children to have that opportunity.

However, something can happen along the way when attempting to find this meaning – we begin trying too hard. We run the risk of trying to convince ourselves that compromise serves us better than our true passion and life’s purpose.  We ignore our inner voice, our inner wisdom, which is attempting to tell us to come back to the center and just be who we are and who we are meant to be.

Just Be-ing is a state of mind, a way of life, and a philosophy.

Doing and having, things and stuff, working and efforting, materialism and wealth spell the death-knell, emotionally, psychologically, mentally, and spiritually when we use these things to define who we are, when we create our identity around them, when we use them
in an attempt to create our happiness and well-be-ing, when we use them to mask our deeper dissatisfaction with who we feel we are deep down.

Obsessed with a self-image, or craving an identity, that depends on living “outside” our self reflects an ego ideal whose sole purpose is to substitute for our perceived feeling of imperfection, lack or defects in our self or in our situation.

This false identity arises from a place of non- acceptance of what we experience in our personality so we strive to overlook and deny who we are, and work on the outside to replace who we are with a fake or phony sense of our self, to shore ourself up.

In essence, because we feel we are not “enough” in some way with who we are, we effort to try to be someone else. Trying to be someone else, we look to the outside, and most often get caught up in a lifestyle that is obsessed with materialistically do-ing, be-ing and hav-ing, with needing to be seen, or feel we are “somebody” – an unconscious attempt to find our self which we call soul – which is a fruitless search when done outside our self.

Why aren’t you happy? It’s because ninety-nine percent of everything you do, and think, and say, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.
-Wu Wei Wu

Live and Learn. We all Do.

Thanks for reading. Please pass this on to someone who means something to you.