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What does it look like to let go of expectations? Why is it so hard to say 'goodbye' to all our ideas about how life is 'supposed' to go?
This isn’t the podcast I was supposed to create.
I had something polished and impressive in mind.
This is more interesting.
You should listen to it.
A bit of background:
I’d already committed to publishing a daily podcast when I got (very, very, very) sick with Long (very, very, very long) COVID.
So, I had a choice:
I could give up, or I could keep my commitment and include my constant exhaustion, fever, foggy-brain, relentless cough —and do my best.
I chose the latter.
My “best” varies quite a bit according to how well or poorly I feel on a given day.
The episodes are raw, out of order, unedited, with uneven audio quality, You’ll often hear my Pekingese, Bija barking in the background.
Sometimes I talk to myself, sometimes I talk to you. Sometimes I have no idea who I’m talking to. It’s a true potpourri.
And it’s not just overhearing me wax poetic through a stuffy nose about new insights and the insufferable discomfort of upended plans. There’s more!
In between the fragments of thought, feeling, and utter nonsense, is a timely and universal story about expectations, meaning making, dropping all agendas, and discovering what’s possible when we Open to What Is.
Tune in.
Sample a few episodes.
See if you can drop all expectations and allow yourself to be surprised and delighted by something you didn’t know you were looking for.
What does it look like to let go of expectations? All those ideas about how life is supposed to go about how your life is supposed to go? What does it look like when everything you have planned just falls apart. We all know about this intimately. We've lived through a global pandemic that just doesn't seem to go away. And there's been extraordinary change upheaval all around us for the last decade, and more. So many things seem to be seem to be changing at such a rapid pace that it's, it's easy to numb out from it all, to just to just kind of put your head under a table just want to escape or to try and control every little detail...it's hard to know what we can depend on. Well, it's hard for me to know. Or maybe it's not, maybe that's an old story. And maybe that's just part of the story. Maybe the story is still unfolding. And really, this is just a lot of little fragments of my story, a moment or two a bunch of moments in a moment of time in my life where I had a lot of ideas about how things were going to go and they didn't go that way. And I was gifted with the privilege of watching myself through the experience because of the way that I had chosen to you engage with everything that was going on. So just a little bit of background I I've spent the last six months doing master coach training and part of that has entailed a project and our projects are things that we get to choose for ourselves and I knew that I wanted my project to be a daily practice. Daily Practice is something that I'm really committed to it's something that I work with people on and i It's taught me a lot in general I think that there's a lot of magic in daily practice, but there were specific things that I wanted to implement. And I was really looking forward to
exploring what it would be like to bring the intensity and rigor of kind of competition or really playing for for a result with the the equanimity, the measured patience, the persistence and the kind of rigorous regular inquiry of daily practice. And that's all talk about, you know, a big part of my interest. My passion is exploring paradoxes, tension. And opposition, really seeing how apparent opposites are always in conversation. And so a tension that I'm acutely aware of, I always have been, is this idea of, you know moment to moment, awareness. Micro habits if you will, and focus on outcomes. goal orientation and because I've spent a lot of time practicing and studying within eastern contemplative traditions, where there's a lot of emphasis on the power of non striving, non attachment to outcomes. And I live in a western culture that is incredibly outcome focused, been really curious about, you know, I've always watched my own process and noticed that it's very challenging for me to bring the quality of committed intensity and unwavering rigor to it, things were, at least in my mind, I have infinite amounts of time, or where I'm not really attached to an outcome. However, in those cases, I tend to be far more relaxed. And at the same time, what happens for me often when I am deeply attached to an outcome, I can really get my own way I can really like can really get caught up in my own expectations about how things are supposed to go, how I'm supposed to be what everything is supposed to look like, and, and the gap between reality and my expectations can ultimately be something that I allowed to knock me down, allow me to really internalize this evidence that you know, I can't succeed. And so that was a problem. It wasn't a problem but it was something that I really wanted to investigate and gain more mastery over. I'm really really interested in living in a way where those two seeming seemingly opposite to ideas of you know, routine, daily, the mundane and I guess we can call it the ordinary every day, moment to moment, way of showing up and then the kind of extraordinary where those things are, are closer, much closer together and maybe in in distinguishable and really living in ways where the goal and the path are basically synonymous. And I think intellectually, it seems easy enough maybe like have good habits manager your mind. But for me anything but easy I often found that when I went to when I had you know, a goal or something that was really important to me, I would let go of the habits that supported that goal, I would let go of the kind of essentials of my routine and I would kind of get swept up in the intensity I would act like a sprinter trying to run a marathon and it just wasn't sustainable. And you know, I'm, I'm ADHD I'm neurodiverse and I believe that you know, the ADHD brain is an awesome gift and I think it's the brain that we all know that more people will need to understand and that has a lot of skills and perspectives that are essential as we move into the next phase of human moral and cognitive evolution I think that you know there's there's really powerful sensitivities and capacities to think laterally to connect the dots to be comfortable with multiplicity that things that are that are just kind of the default for for many neurodiverse people that you know, I'm I'm so grateful or part of my part of my wiring but at the same time I am there are there are tendencies that I have that aren't not as helpful in terms of more traditional linear approaches to time management, setting goals follow through breaking down a big idea into smaller parts, those things are things that I really struggle with. So it's gonna be part of what I talk about is just what that's looked like for me...