Do You Want to Live in this World or Create a New One?

Life is always evolving, most often in small unseen ways that are so subtle, yet over time create a big impact. It evolves when you make different choices to the ‘norm’. Consider your daily routines, how much of them exist because of well-meaning expectations as you were being brought up, rather than conscious decisions you have made listening to your inner knowing?

As I bring up my own children, although I have concluded many times in these articles that my role is to get out of their way and provide only love and inspiration, I notice how often I intervene. The compulsion to do this, I’ve decided, is driven by either others’ expectations of me as ‘the parent’ or my own desire to simply rest and have peace.

As the school year starts here in the southern hemisphere, my eldest daughter has continued in her resistance to attending each day. She actually quite enjoys much of what she is being taught, and she so loves seeing all her friends, but she has a strong desire to go with her own flow and not dance to the beat of the ‘machine’.

Both my partner and I sympathize with this desire as we have slowly found our own way back to tuning in to what we each want out of life. It feels like a moral dilemma of sorts as I advocate for people to live life from the inside out yet am forcing my child to ignore her inner world in order to conform.

In this country there is a legal obligation for children to attend school between 6 – 16 years old, or for the parent to have successfully obtained an exemption by home schooling. I’m not sure I can picture myself home-schooling and, even if I felt the impulse to do that, I am not sure that is what she actually wants.

Instead I am getting better at stepping away from the issue and listening in to whatever answers present themselves, like picking her up earlier and allowing her some regular home days that work for both of us. When I attended school as a young child, that was unheard of. Certainly it would have been rare to ever hear a teacher suggest a child having rest days to a parent, as ours does. Our children are changing and our world has evolved.

Yet there is still so much well meaning advice plied in our direction, pressure to have our kids behave and conform. The default is still to micromanage every detail of their lives, with most parents lost in a sea of their own layers of doubts and self defeating thought patterns.

Imagine as an adult if, in the next 10 years of your life, you have no choice about what you do day to day as our children do when it comes to school. Some of you may indeed feel like that, but you do have a choice.  I want my kids to feel their own power, I want to cheer them on from the sidelines as they create a more evolved world.

Regardless of where your life is at, you can – at the very least – start to become aware of your thoughts and feelings. You can start to become more aware of that inner voice that will unfailingly want to lead you towards your best life.

It’s not the voice of doubt and doom I’m talking about, those are your unhelpful thought patterns, the ones that began all those years ago as you were taught to ‘behave’ and second guess your every desire. It’s the thoughts that pop into your head that seem to come from nowhere that are worth listening to.

As I was going about my day earlier in the week, a reader that I exchange emails with now and again came into to my head a couple of times. So I decided to email him and just check in, as I did I got a sense he was going through some deep changes and the teacher in him is emerging even more, so I shared this with him.

Not too long ago it would have felt both ridiculous and audacious to have said such a thing, the voice in my head would have told me I had just conjured it up. Yet this resonated with him and he was grateful I had got in touch, he felt supported even. A simple thing I know, but that one impulse has allowed more clarity for him in terms of his own direction, and more confidence. In turn it has given me more confidence to trust my own senses.

As new generations are born they are less willing to be swayed from their inner knowing. For those of us trying to find our way back to it, it can feel lonely to take the path less travelled. Yet as you discover your inner world you will uncover the freedom you have yearned for And a world where we are listening to our inner voice, is a world more evolved than this one.
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