Eating Life Like Roaring Lions

Life - our meal - is right in front of us.

The lion runs after it, with full abandon, giving it his all, to catch this meal.

What do we do?

In my first post, I wrote about life being a huge wave of energy and what to do with it.

This post looks at the opportunities this enormous wave gives us and how we respond to that.

Do we go for life, do we follow our heart and dreams? Do we take the leap? Or do we retreat into the mind and think our dreams to death? We can think and analyze things so much that we wind up with our back in a corner and there is nowhere to go. This is how indecisiveness is born. Weighing the pros and cons, reviewing the possible catastrophic scenarios that may manifest. And then we just don’t know anymore.

A solution to this is the razor-sharp sword of the heart. The heart that is open, clear, pristine, and spontaneous, driven by the flame of joy that is irrepressible zest for life, no holds barred.

Please don’t think now that if you are indecisive or are struggling with this scenario that this is bad. It isn’t. If this is what is going on with us, there is a reason. And instead of wishing it were different, we can accept this circumstance in our lives and work with it. When we do this, this circumstance becomes the ground of our learning and the portal to growth and change.

This reminds me of the squirrel I saw recently in my front yard. I happened to see it sitting on the edge of the roof over my porch and take a giant leap to a thin branch of the tree in my yard. He, or she, was just able to catch the end of the branch and clamp onto it. It swung up and down ferociously while the squirrel climbed upward.

What an amazing moment to catch.

And it certainly captures life, doesn’t it? There was risk in that leap. I wonder how long he thought about it before jumping. Do you think it ever happens that an animal doesn’t do something because she is weighing the pros and cons?

Animals are in direct contact with their instincts and follow them. They act and they are not always successful. They may misjudge the coldness of the water, the thickness of the ice, or the length of the swim, or a host of other things. That is life. It is full of risk.

We have the benefit, and sometimes curse, of our powerful neocortex, our ability to think, analyze, sort, and judge. This ability helps us to separate from life and to have distance from our instincts. There is a good reason for this but it has consequences. We retreat into the mind and engage in all kinds of fearful thinking and catastrophic scenarios that could play out: Can I reach the branch? Will I be able to hold on? Can I climb up it? Will I slip as I push off the roof or hang on the branch? Will the branch swing so much that it will catapult me off into space? Will a big hawk or eagle come and take me as I hang there? Will that be the end of my life? Will I fall and hurt myself? Will I die?

This is one busy squirrel.

Here is another example. There is a famous event in the life of Robert the Bruce, a freedom fighter in Scotland in the early 1300s, who united the clans and won against an overwhelming English army. In the beginning of his struggle, he is a hunted man and he sits despondently in a cave in the Scottish Highlands. It is a very low moment. He sees a spider on the wall trying to get a thread across the cave opening. He is not successful. He fails time and again. But he keeps going and eventually succeeds. The meaning of this event in the Bruce’s life is that you keep trying, but I want to point out something else. Do you think the spider was thinking negatively? Saying to herself: I can’t do this. Why does the bloody thread not connect and stick to the other side? Why is this happening to me? What have I done to deserve this? It’s that other cave wall; it won’t allow the thread to stick. I may as well give up. What’s the point anyway?

That’s not what this spider was thinking or she would have stopped and gone elsewhere. It shows us the power of the thinking mind. And how destructive it can be when used in fear.

Let’s be clear. The mind is a wonderful and powerful tool. Our ability to think is very important. But this mind becomes a problem when it is disconnected from the heart and usurps the role of the leader.

For many of us, the thinking mind has become disconnected and does its own thing. Now we are in trouble and the squirrel sits on the edge of the roof and thinks and thinks and he does nothing. Perhaps he slinks off the roof the easy way. What she missed is that leap into space and connecting with something in that space that takes her further on her journey.

Simply put, the heart has the blueprint and the dreams, the thinking mind provides the how, and the body the physical work. That is teamwork between the mind, the heart, and the body. We just need to get our priorities straight and leave the leadership to the heart.

What happens when the squirrel sits shivering on the edge of the roof, worrying about what might happen? She is engaging in fear and projecting that onto a future that is not here, a future that is unknown.

Fear is an important and useful emotion. It gives us vital information about our safety. But often our fears are not associated with our current moment and environment – God, there comes the eagle swooping out of the sky – but what we think might happen in the future. This is a different beast. And a beast it is as it can paralyze us and prevent us from living our dreams and moving forward.

I remember when I was a little girl and going to swimming lessons. One day, we had a graduation and parents came out to watch us. I was at the deep end of the pool and the idea was to jump in but I was scared. The teacher needed to hand me into the water. It can be scary to jump into the deep end.

Fear, if not vital information needed in the moment, contracts us, makes us retreat from life and we hide in our shells. This is what fearful thinking does. We conjure up a negative future and don’t live life the way we could. Instead of roaring lions we become deer in the headlights. This thinking activity is a virtual game played in the virtual arena of the mind. It isn’t real. What is real is what is here now, everything else is potential.

It is understandable we want to be safe. We are vulnerable entities and the ego is our defense mechanism. But there is a price to pay for this kind of safety. We can’t have it all. The safer we want to be, the less freedom we will have and the less we will live life. And the roaring lion will be pacing back and forth in her self-imposed prison. A terrible thing to encounter in zoos. I cringe when I see that. I don’t go to zoos anymore.

The handmaiden of fear is regret. When the squirrel is old and contemplates his life while sitting on his stash of nuts, he thinks back to that mighty leap he was going to take but didn’t. What would have happened if he had? How could life have opened for him? Where would the leap into that large tree have taken him? A question that can now never be answered.

But not to forget common sense. Don’t take the leap into the deep end if you know you can’t swim. Or throw all caution to the winds and blindly take the jump if you are not in your heart or in the zone. Then the spontaneity of the now is gone and we make mistakes. The heart provides discernment, and this is vital to develop.

The heart calls us. The heart that is wide open and bleeding, the heart of the Christ. Open to the unlimited potential of life, real, direct, in your face, feeling the hurt of the world like a knife, yet still open, absorbing that hurt in the inner fire. Do we hear the call from this heart? Or are we busy with the chaos of our minds and life and we don’t hear that voice and prompting? When we do hear, do we answer? Do we answer the call to adventure? The call to adventure that can open up our life and lead to a happier and more fulfilled one. The call that can also give us the ultimate opportunity to break our shell and wake up in a wide awake world of freedom, creativity, and potential.