Recently as an Uber passenger traveling through an unfamiliar city, I was awakened to a powerful message and truth.
During our hour drive together, I found my driver to be a very kind and engaging individual. However, my destination had found him navigating some very sketchy roads and terrain. The terrain that we found ourselves heading down consisted of very narrow streets wedged tightly between two very high walls. As the road got thinner and thinner, he realized he needed to reverse ourselves out of the road that we were currently on. I watched empathetically as the driver’s stress levels rose while he started the process of backing out of that tight spot. While spinning around and bashing the gear stick, he began to use a lot of swear words & was unraveling. It pains me to admit this but, what I was observing was the splitting image of how I’d responded to overwhelming situations throughout my life.
While sitting in the backseat unsure of what to say or do, I began to hear loud, repeated beeping of a horn sounds. This added an extra layer of stress to my driver’s experience and he began to get even angrier. Now he began shouting out his window that he was doing the best he could and to leave us alone. This beeping horn noise was stuck on repeat but, when I turned around to see who was behind us no one was there. In fact, it was my driver doing the beeping from inside the car. Every time he turned around, he was pressing the horn by mistake.
I took a risk and whispered my discovery in between his outbursts and, for a moment, he flashed me a smile. I saw the realization land with him, and it was this that seemed to calm him and allow him to do the final bit of reversing steadily and he managed to turn around and head back out onto the wider road.
What I’d encountered that day was a great lesson. One that helped me realize that I’ve been unknowingly beeping at myself for many years.
I’ve spent hours (sometimes without realizing it) fantasizing about all the things that will go wrong but often, I didn’t look at these fearful fantasy possibilities very closely. Maybe it’s time to stop to really see what I’ve been up to, and what I’m really telling myself about life?
Maybe you too have been drawing your attention to the fact that we hurt ourselves over and over again when we are running these fear stories.
When we are attacking with our thoughts, we will then fear attack. So, the world will look fearful to us not because it’s a scary place but, because we make it a scary place by assuming we must be attacked in return for the attacking we are doing. In other words, that beeping we can hear coming from outside the car? On closer inspection, it turns out we are the ones doing the beeping.
Could it be that ‘nothing except our thoughts can attack us?’ This is confronting news but should also be a relief. If the action is going on in my own thoughts, I have the power to change my experience of the world and of myself. Might I even get more of a glimpse of the way of my true royal nature?
What’s visible above water level is what we consciously know we are afraid of. What we want to reveal today is some of the things that lie underneath the water level.
If you’d like to explore with me, dig into these three steps listed below.
1. Figuring out what you are concerned about.
2. Looking beneath the iceberg tip to find out more about why you are so concerned.
3. After each outcome you discover, repeat to yourself: ‘That thought is an attack upon myself.’
The idea here is to go into some depth with a few fears you have. Coming to know that you are, in fact, ‘invulnerable’ – that this process of excavation of thoughts and belief patterns is actually revealing bit by bit what already exists in you: your true royal nature, held onto by Love, untouched by anything that happens in this world.
In gratitude,
Wade
