Discipline and Letting Go

It's a beautiful Sunday morning and I'm walking through the woods and thinking about my characters and my week of Discipline. What I’ve learned, where I’ve struggled, the aha’s I continue to have, and the resources that support me through it all.

Right now, I’m thinking about pickleball coming up and that has me stuck. And I think it is reflective of the stuck-ness that I feel around my vision for accelerated success, my vision for future of peace and ease and flow and abundance, my vision for doing my work anywhere in the world and enjoying solitude and nature to support me and to support my restoration.

Looking back on the week and thinking about the two new characters that I found, “Polly Perfect” and “Groot”, and as I’m walking through the woods, I see so much groundedness and rootedness of big forest trees. How solid they are and how I can try and draw on that as my wisdom voice, aka Groot. I also see the uprootedness of huge trees fallen. And how reflective they are of my fear self, my lost self, my forgetting self. Uprooted and vulnerable to the elements and dying. There is something about it that feels familiar to my struggle. Uprooted, fearful and dying. Is it my vision that is dying? Is it my hope that is dying? Is it my love of self that is dying? Is it my trust and faith in God that is dying? I don’t know – but the familiarity is imbedded in that character of fear and anxiety, aka "Polly Perfect".

Looking back on the week, I found myself stuck in moments and struggling. As I started to do the work back plan (discipline of action) and really look at future milestones and all that would need to be in place along the way to achieve the goals,  fear and doubt just came flooding in. Voices saying, “What the hell? Who are you?”. You know those voices. We’ve been warned of them over and over again. And yet they are there in waiting, ready to rear their head and scream with such force. "Who the hell are you? Just be happy with what you have, you selfish, spoiled, privileged white girl. Get over yourself." All of those messages came looming forth. And I’ve had to fight the dragons – they feel like dragons that are going for my throat - I’ve had to fight them and wrestle them and the only way to fight and wrestle those voices is with that character of wisdom, Groot. Groot draws on the grounded, centered nature of that rooted tree. That part of me that does not fear, that does not fall, that moves with the wind and simply allows storms to blow through, never losing sight of itself, its strength, its power, its courage, it’s wisdom. The tree never forgets. And if a powerful enough storm does come and does blow it over, it lets go, does not resist and it allows life in that form to be over. The resistance and the struggle to control everything and to know everything is where the suffering lies.

I saw it reflected this week externally in my pickleball playing – which is the playground of my life lessons right now – externalized. As I was struggling this week, I saw that internal struggle manifested externally when I was trying to play pickleball and all of those voices that I’d been struggling with showed up and crippled me and crushed me and won. The voices started after three bad hits, three hits that didn’t go where I wanted them to go, resistance to a wet ground, and fear because I was playing with people that were significantly better players than me. And voices of not wanting to disappoint, and not wanting to be a bad partner, and not wanting to have a bad day. And of course that’s all that happened and those voices just snowballed so fast that by the end of one game, I was finished. And I not only decided I was failing, but I decided to go prove it in one more game and if I fail in one more game, I’m going home and quitting. And of course, I met my second partner and said, “hello partner, let me just tell you I’m sucking today, I’m playing terribly today and if I lose this game, I’m going home.” So talk about manifesting your destiny and talk about law of attraction. I attracted another losing game and up the tears came and the self doubt and the self loathing, and then…I projected it onto Matthew (my life partner) and made it his voice. I made my voices of doubt and disappointment be Matthews voices of doubt and disappointment in me. And I got into this illusionary fantasy and just about had the relationship finished because I just wanted to be alone, and safe, and isolated from myself and these thoughts of Polly Perfect. And that was the painful manifestation of the week.

So here I am Sunday, walking in the woods and the gorgeous sunshine, my safe place, my place of refuge and I just want to stay in this place of refuge forever. I’m fantasizing about coming back with Matthew’s RV, or renting a little Airbnb. Isolating out here for a week or so, and just being in heaven where there is no external fear and there is no external struggle. That’s what I long for. No external struggle and no fear. And that is a grand illusion.

So coming back to what we do with this – the discipline of the mind. I’ve been struggling with the fear that started with the Discipline of Action that triggered the mind. But then the mind takes over in a much more fierce and forceful way. So what to do with the mind? We use the mind, on the mind. Which is again the point of these characters. These relationships inside ourselves that we need to familiarize ourselves with and draw upon. So drawing on the voice of wisdom, the rootedness of that tree, the beauty of the water, the calm glass straights of Juan de Fuca, the winds and tides that come and go. And how each moment is different. You can walk the same path a hundred times and every single time it’s actually new.

There is such peace in letting go. Letting go of yesterday and the past. Instead of walking on this path today, thinking about pickleball this afternoon (which Matthew very much wants to go play and I very much want to resist) with doubt, there is an opportunity. Rather than thinking “three strikes you’re out, Kathy. You’ve had two bad pickleball days, so boy, go again and if you have one more, then three strikes your’e out, give it up”, and putting all the pressure on the day that boy I better have a good day today and today better correct the course for me of my mind from the negativity of the last two times, I can choose differently.

The opportunity is to draw on that rooted tree energy and to remember who I am and to remember that the external world has nothing to do with who I am.  Nothing to do with who God knows me to be, with who God wants me to be, with the Source and the opportunity that I have to simply be all of it, share all of it, and take another step with expectation…but not attachment.

And that’s the journey to accelerating my own success. Grateful for the abundance and the wisdom that surrounds me this moment and every moment that I’m alive.

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