To the mind it seems as if life brings forth situations that require one to take decisions and choose between one path or the other. A lot people complain about their inability to take quick decisions and their tendency to make senseless, or wrong, decisions. Here are a few pointers on how to resolve indecisions of your mind in a manner that brings in the deeper wisdom of your wholeness.
Allow for some space in your mind activity
The conditioned part of your mind operates purely on past data and so if this is only tool you are going to use to make decision, you will end up repeating your past over and over again. Creative, and fresh, solutions can never flower through from this part of the mind. Stop focusing on your “thinking” activity, and just relax your attention enough to allow some “gaps” in between your thoughts. These gaps of silence are actually openings for the wisdom of your “pure consciousness” to seep in, and resolve the indecisions of the moment.
Avoid the urge to move from fear
A lot of people take decisions with an underlying energy of fear. Any fear dominated decision will create a situation for you that reflects the same fear in one form or the other. You might be required to make some decision under what the mind labels as “crisis” situations, but if you allow yourself to be pulled in by the fear based energy of your mind, your decisions will lack wisdom and would not be solution oriented – in fact they might end up creating more problems for you than they resolve. One must be very conscious to ensure that their movement is not coming from a place of fear.
Don’t be hurried into a decision
There is really no hurry in life, except that the mind makes you think so. The mind is always looking for “crisis” in a situation and hence gets panicked far too often. If you are lost in the mind, you will always find yourself “hurried” to take decisions. In truth, life moves at very relaxed pace and once you get out of the mind you will experience this “non chaotic” smooth flow of life. If people around you are “hurrying” you into making a decision, just tell them to relax and give you some space. Remember that a hurried mind is always coming from a place of fear.
Decisions get made for you if you allow it
In truth, the mind is not required to “make” decisions because the mind does not have the resources, or the intelligence, to do so. The conditioned mind never has the “big” picture. There is an intelligence far vaster than the mind which is running this life’s show, and this intelligence is always available as the underlying silence below the mind’s noise. If you just stay in a place of relaxed allowing, decisions will get made for you. There will be a sense that somehow life just moves in a way that gives you a deep certainty in what you should be doing at this moment. So you are never confused about what is the right thing to do.
Sen,
What advice do you have for someone already in financial crisis and getting close to bankruptcy and losing his job. He is very unhappy at his job, so losing it is not a problem, except for the financial stability. He has two boys to raise and provide health insurance for. What can you advise? It is very hard for him to stay in relaxed awareness and trust life when he feels like he is in such a dire situation. Ideally, he would like to start a new career in something he enjoys, but is unsure how to do that with his family obligations. Can you provide a step by step approach to handling the indecision? My advice is to let go of trying to figure out what he will do and trust life to lead him to the answer.
Carrie, the financial or career situation is not an “independent” situation that needs to get sorted out in isolation – it’s all connected to the state of being of the person involved, and it affects all aspects of his/her be it relationship, finance, health or creativity. An overall inner growth is needed before the outside situation starts syncing up. A lot of people focus too much on the “outer work” instead of focusing on the “inner work” mostly because doing the inner work causes you to face your mind, and your emotional space, which we constantly try to escape from. The approach should be that this person stops focusing so much on the situation, and starts using it as an opportunity to sense the disconnection within him, and start connecting more with his sense of being, with his heart and mind. The guidance is already present within, and the solutions are manifested with ease when there is little or no resistance within. You can’t create an aligned external reality without first having an balance within. If this person is driven by fear, constantly obsesses with negative conclusions, has little trust in the intelligence of his lifestream and is generally someone who compromises on his instinct for joy, then he needs to work on bringing a transformation to this attitude first. The attitude should be one of relaxed allowing, allowing oneself to be moved by inner inspiration rather than mind created fear, not hanging on to the negative conclusions of the mind but allowing a trust towards the intelligence of your life-stream to orchestrate the right solutions – this is the mindset of abundance, and unless one starts aligning with it it’s a given that one just keeps attracting a lack-based reality. Ultimately it’s about a conscious choice towards this attitude, not as an experiment but as an understanding of life.
Thank you, Sen. He is definitely on the upswing. I think a change in the situation is already manifesting for him and his boys.