Why do we create a storm in a glass of water?

We are born and we come into this world naked, free of social conditioning, free of rules and regulations and restrictions and fears and moral concepts. We just exist!

At the beginning we just eat, poop and sleep, and slowly we start to develop, we start recognizing faces, sounds. We start to realize when we are cold, when we are hot, what food we like, what we dislike and next thing you know we are stuck in a corporate job working in a tall glass building, buying bottled water, eating food from a box and pumping up pills to make up for the lack of vitamin D.

How on Earth did we get here?

When we are born, we don’t know much, we are pure, we explore, we experiment. The first time we see a lemon instinctually as babies we take it to our mouth only to realize that it is sour. And slowly by experimenting like that we learn the unspoken rules of life.

The discovery process can be wonderful but sometimes can also be hard. It all depends on the environment you are born in. It depends on the country, your socio-economic background, your neighbors, the year when you are born etc.. You can be born in a beautiful loving Ukrainian family in the middle of a war, or you can be born in a violent abusive family living on top of Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Everything plays a role and there is no perfect family, nor perfect environment, but all these elements put together shape us growing up.

Some say that we signed a soul contract before we are born, to come into a family and to experience certain experiences and live certain hardships as part of our karma. How much of that is true I don’t know because I did not speak to anyone that came back from the dead, but I do believe in karma in the Buddhist sense.

But besides that, we learn the rules of our family, the rules of our school, the rules of our close community, and we keep adding new sets of rules on top of rules until our free naked curiosity we had when we first tasted that lemon is so eroded that we become so scared to even try new things.

We become so shaped by the social rules that we risk losing our sense of inner knowing, we stop questioning ourselves, we stop questioning our reality and we take things for granted and we restrict ourselves to what is “comfortable”.

We go to school then to university, we follow the footsteps of our parents or our mentors, we get jobs as lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants because those are safe well-paid jobs. But let me ask you this:

When you were a young kid did you dream of working with documents in front of a computer all day, or did you dream of exploring the world and experimenting flavors, sounds, feelings, places? 

Somewhere along the way, on our path through the various layers of rules, we learn that we “should” go to university so we can get a good traineeship so we can get a job, so we can buy a house, so we can pay mortgage, so we can get married so we can have kids, and so our kids can pay for our pension... So that those kids have to do 2 unpaid traineeships, 1 paid traineeship and still be considered underqualified for a junior entry job, only to pursue their “dream” to become a good employee so they can get a mortgage etc.

You see where I am going with this?

Somewhere on this path, fear and scarcity mindset were instilled within us.

We function from fear that we will not get the internship, and then if that happens, we don’t get the job and then we won’t be successful or we won’t find the perfect life partner and we won’t have the perfect house in the suburbs with flowers and two dogs and we enter this never-ending loop of “I have to do this one thing to achieve this other thing”. And when we get there, we realize that in order to keep up with the game we have to continue doing things that maybe we don’t even want.

So why do we do the things that we do? 

Because somewhere on the path we forgot to listen to ourselves, we lost our exploratory and creative instincts, and we were brainwashed into a fear and scarcity mindset. We forgot to live in the present moment, because at the end of the day that is all we have: NOW.

Tomorrow is no guarantee. So stop and smell the roses (or tulips ☺️).

Sure, it is nice to make plans and create and build a future, but it should not be done at the expense of sacrificing our present. We become so serious with our future goals, that forget to enjoy life to enjoy the present moment.

Meditation teaches us to live in the present moment and work with awareness to realize our humanity and to live to the fullest. I didn’t say meditation allows us to live a happy peaceful life, but that it allows us to live to the fullest and that is what the human experience is about.

As a baby, when you taste that lemon for the first time, you are completely naïve, and you taste the lemon, and you don’t like but you accept it and move on. As grown-ups we tend to make a big fuss out of nothing, and we give a lot of energy to things that are not important. So as an adult we taste the lemon, we complain that it is sour, two days later we complain to our friends about it, one week later we spend one week in therapy talking about it and next thing you know we wasted days of our lives on a not so nice experience.

The experience was very brief, but our perception and the energy that we put into it made it bigger than it really was so now it occupies an important role in our evolution and development because we will have this new rule that from now onwards, we shall not touch, taste, or even look at a lemon.

And so, we create new restrictions on ourselves. Of course, the lemon is just a metaphor for an unpleasant experience, but we also know that a lemon cake is very good, or that a lemonade is tasty on a hot summer day. So, you see there are always more sides to a story than what meets the eye.

With meditation we learn to taste the lemon, feel the sour taste, and just like the child have the awareness of the sourness and then move on in life without engaging too much into it, without giving it too much energy, without creating a storm in a glass of water. We then learn how to live in the present moment and let go of our self-restricting ego build rules and regulations, we learn how to make the most out of this human experience.

So why do we do the things we do?

Because we are burdened by so many rules and regulations, some imposed by society, some inherited from family, some due to traumatic events, some self-imposed… and here we are living constricted by the cage of our mind.

We are looking at reality through tainted glass and the perception build by our ego over years and years of social conditioning…

What is the solution?

You won’t like what I am about to say, but I suggest you learn meditation so you can raise your awareness and learn to live in the present moment and not give in to your fear.

And don’t take yourself too seriously, because in the end nobody comes out alive, so why not enjoy the journey while it lasts.

With loving presence,

Florina,

Mindful Connecting

Ps. If you liked what you read follow me on social media @mindfulconnecting and join me on my journey of self discovery, growth and love 💚