A new criteria for living

I was talking with a client recently about embracing the Wake Up Call and what it means for our lives.  He had been telling me that when he looked back through his life it felt like a failure. That everything he had done was a mistake and that he had wasted the last 45 years. Wrong career, wrong relationship, wrong home – everything felt wrong.  This can be a very challenging place to find yourself, and when you start looking at your life in the terms of mistakes it is all too easy to snowball into a feeling of despair.  Problem was is that he was judging his life with the wrong criteria.

Oddly enough this is all a matter of perspective.

I had a client come on retreat and as we drove back down the mountain after our two days together she told me that she had believed that just changing your perspective was not enough to change how you felt about life.  She had thought that it had to be something more to change how you lived life and your experience of life.  However we had spent the past two days challenging her old perspective and in fact everything had changed because of that. She had arrived feeling stuck and left after two days feeling unstuck and ready to address life with a renewed zest.

Your perspective, how you look at life and the beliefs you let rule your life are in fact the main thing you have to change. And for that you need a new input, new ideas, new ways of looking at your world.

When we experience the Wake Up Call, when everything in our lives looks like a mistake, we need a new criteria, a new perspective. If we look at life at face value it is all too easy to judge our decisions as wrong. However looking at life at face value is not really very helpful, we need to look a little deeper.

I believe that life is about growth and learning.

It is about growing and expanding our understanding of who we are and why we are here. Just for a moment think about your life as a learning journey. Think of all the challenges that you have faced and surmounted, and the ones that flattened you too. What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about others? What did you gain?

When I am stuck in these challenges even if I can’t see the learning the one thing I know for sure is that I am gaining inner strength with each and every challenge in my life. And it is the same for you too.

Not only that but all these experiences can help you define your next steps. It can help you define a different criteria with which to create the next era of your life.

Firstly when you know what you don’t want it can help point to what you do want.

Then you can look at each area of your life where you think you failed and ask yourself – what did I learn? Where is this pointing? How can I use that lesson to ensure that I create what will fulfill me this time? What can I change in light of this?

Review why you made certain decisions.

Maybe you were trying to please someone, a parent, a partner, a sibling. Take the time to ask yourself who was I trying to please – me or someone else? Do I still want to play the pleasing game or do I now come first?

And if you were pleasing someone else – that’s ok. You were doing the best you could at the time. If you could have made a different decision you would have. No one ever gets up in the morning and says to themselves – ‘today I’m going to ruin my life!’. It just does not happen like that. Every decision we make, whatever we think of them with hindsight – was the best one we could have made at the time.

So what is the new criteria you need to answer the Wake Up Call?

It is an honest and open one. It is you letting yourself know, with the benefit of hindsight and the lessons you’ve learnt along the way, what your heart really wants. It is listening to you and you alone, no ‘shoulds’ or ‘ought tos’ or any other voice, inner or outer, telling you what to do.

And know this – if all this relates to you it is no mistake that you stand here right now. Your life and all that has been in it has lead you here. And here is exactly where you are supposed to be. It can’t be otherwise, because if it could have been – it would have been. At some point we all need to surrender into life, know that this moment of the Wake Up Call is exactly right and that what lies ahead is a wonderful adventure of expansion – and if we let it – fun.  And if you’d like to explore how coming on retreat can help you define your own criteria for how you’d like your life to look and feel then drop me a line now.  I’d love to welcome you back to yourself.

Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/jeremy_thomas