Our limitations
When we were kids everything was possible, anything we could think of was possible and the sky was the limit. We were fearless and the world was only limited to our wildest imagination. We were the dreamer of the dream.
Then blow-by-blow we started to limit ourselves; like all things it started in our thoughts because in truth that is the only place it ever happens. And now here we are, living in a time when we are surrounded by our personal and collective limitations. We hear it almost continuously on the news, in conversations and in our thoughts. We can’t do this or that because we have too little money, time, resources and courage etc. We have an endless list of reasons why we can’t do much of anything and we become increasingly limited in our lives.
We finally become withdrawn, complaining constantly about how no one around us seems to have initiative: how the government is not governing well, how our partners and our kids are not getting on with their lives, how others don’t excel in what they do. Yet, like all our advice, in truth it is really for ourselves.
So now we are caught between our limiting beliefs and our withdrawal, which makes every endeavour difficult. Then mostly we don’t start much or, if we do, we have little trust in any meaningful success. Herein lies the core of so many partnership conflicts; the negative withdrawn partners balanced out by those who take the opposite tack of being very positive and therefore in denial, yet also seldom delivering any meaningful results.
It is important that each one of us strives to reverse this process in our lives and in our schools and in the world because basically none of it is true. Our limitations certainly feel like they are true but, as we all well know, feeling something is true and it being true are two very different things. We are only limited by ourselves and we need to learn to not be caught by these beliefs and self-concepts for they only lead to attack and then self-attack which further drives the cycle of self-limitation.
The first step in breaking this cycle is to truly give ourselves, to extend ourselves to the people and the world around us breaking our withdrawal, moving past our illusionary comfort zone; for we learn that when we give ourselves we discover our true nature which is limitless!
Then would we dare to reawaken the childhood dreamer within? Today, take the time to reconnect with the loss of this limitless and happy creative self, at whatever age it began; on the other side of the mourning of this loss we find the freedom to commit once more to begin to dream. One of our favourite quotes is the familiar one by Goethe, part of which goes like this:
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
With love,
Jeff and Sue