Building upon last week’s post…
As there often is, there is another angle from which we can view our persistent unproductive behaviors. While looking for the payoff is great for finding the hidden addiction or attachment that keeps us clinging to the unproductiveness, and therefore great to open a path for us to unhook ourselves from it, sometimes we need just a bit more nudge to actually do it. After all, it may be unproductive, but we’re used to it and we’ve survived this long (or so says our calculating self), so it’s just easier to go along, right?
In those moments, we can get present to the cost.
And not just the cost in the unproductive results that we may already see and know, but the deeper costs that, like the payoff, is often hidden from our view. The costs that cut deep to the core of what we truly want, costs that sap us and our experience of life: our vitality, our enjoyment of life, our connection and rapport with others, our well-being, our peace of mind, our health, our satisfaction, our self-expression, our fulfilment, or a myriad of other things we become numb to.
Once we open our mindfulness and let ourselves become present to these costs, the balance shifts. The calculating self begins to see that some of these are threats even to itself, and, even more so, our central and authentic selves gain succor and the strength to assert itself and say, “We are done with that now.”
And lo, we regain our agency and step forward to re-write our history going forward. The already automatic ways of being and behaving begins to be interrupted, open to our creation towards that which is productive and that fills us with delight and peace and love.
Best of all, as we continue to put that into motion, soon that becomes our already, always, automatic, replacing our shackled downward spirals with ones that we can change anytime and that aligns us towards prosperity for ourselves and those around us.
Lynx Thoughts 