What’s your Quality?

“Once I have ‘X,’ then I’ll be happy/fulfilled/peaceful/in love with my life…” It’s incredible how the mind works and even more incredible how easily we believe the constraints we have built in our own.

“Once I have a six figure salary, then I’ll be free.”

“Once I find my purpose in life, then I’ll be able to enjoy it.”

Qualities like freedom, happiness, love, peace, joy, etc may seem like a fantasy — like your fanciest outfit that you only get to wear once a year. But what if they were something as real as your most comfortable pair of shoes, the ones you get to wear every day?

During my time at the University of Santa Monica (USM), where I was enrolled in the 10-month course in Spiritual Psychology, we were encouraged to choose a quality that we wanted to wholeheartedly invite into our life. The word that stood out to me so obviously was acceptance.

It was during the first weekend of my 10-month program at USM that I found out I was pregnant — acceptance seemed like a perfect word to fit the unknown nature of pregnancy and childbirth. Pregnancy was something I knew from the outside but had never experienced myself. I knew if I could live in acceptance that no matter what happened–scary things, unexpected things, things outside of my control–being in acceptance would mean everything would be exactly how it was supposed to be.

Wow. I discovered acceptance was totally different from what I thought it was. The story I had been telling myself around acceptance was, “once they change (a person and/or situation), then I’ll be able to accept them.” When in reality what occurred through wearing acceptance daily like that pair of shoes, was that I was able to see that once I accepted them (said person and/or situation), my entire life shifted so that I was able to experience more peace no matter what was going on around me.

What qualities are you willing to wear RIGHT NOW rather than waiting for them to show up in your life?

 

Emily Russak

@emboslice_