Intention for the week:
ALLOW
I recently took my daughter to the aquarium for a birthday party. It was a Sunday afternoon at the same time as a football game happening just a few blocks away. Thanks to very strange work schedules, my husband and I very rarely (or never) go to public places on the weekend. We typically have the privilege of going on a, much quieter, weekday.
As such, my brain was picturing crowds and crowds of people, impossible parking, and unrelenting traffic.
What’s more, because of the timing of everything, I knew we would have about 2 hours to wander around the aquarium in between the party room portion and the dolphin show. What on earth am I going to do at the aquarium, amidst thousands of people, for 2 hours?!
I started thinking back over previous experiences at places like the zoo, botanical gardens etc. My mind filled with images of me running after 2 small humans, both wanting to do different things, anxiety as I tried to fit everything in, make everyone happy, and get out of the place before dinner/nap/meltdown time. At its essence, these memories are overladen with fighting to control a situation that is bursting out of my hands at every chance. Like trying to hold on to a super slippery and wiggling fish that is far too big for my hands.
Bottom line…the effort to try and control the experience is exhausting, stressful, not at all fun, but in many cases, necessary.
However, on this particular day at the aquarium, I had a completely difference experience. Due to the fact that we had loads of time, I subconsciously just let go of the reigns. I just allowed the time to move and shift and exist exactly as it did; as it unfolded. If my daughter wanted to pretend for 20 minutes that a particular window into a tank was our home, we did it. If she wanted to play the seal racing game 10 times, we did it. When she got hungry, we went to the café and got a snack. When she wanted to see something again, we turned around, against human traffic, and went back. There was zero forcing, zero control, zero resistance, zero stress. I just allowed.
This simple experience showed me how much our efforts to control the flow and outcomes of situations can cause us stress. The reason for this is simple: when we try and control how something goes, we immediately put expectations on its outcome and, by doing this, we set ourselves up for either succeeding or failing. We build a wall made up of some arbitrary standard against which we measure our performance against and, as such, we can either win or lose, succeed or fail.
Think about something in your life that you are currently fighting against? What would it look like if you loosened your grip on the reigns and just allowed? How would this change your experience of the situation and your ability to respond to it?
Let me be clear… I am in no way advocating for complacency. Rather, keep the effort, the passion, the focus, the value, but drop the fight, the resistance, the white knuckled grip.
So, for this next few days, try to just ALLOW for things in your life to unfold. Loosen your grip and change the way you experience something.
With joy,
Tara
Integrative Life Coach, ERYT, MMT Wholistic Joy Wellness
