4 Steps to lighten up

Tenderfoot Yogi Podcast and Audio Blog: Perspectives and Insights for Ease in Your Awakening

At some time or another we’ve all been told, sometimes pleasantly with love and other times less pleasantly with a degree of judgement to ‘lighten up already’. Wouldn’t it be excellent if lightening up were this easy? Because it is certainly true that in most cases the natural internal response to being told to lighten up is something like, “Gee thanks, I’d love to…if only I knew how.” Lightness can mean many things. It’s more than a positive outlook or the difference between happy and sad. There is a sense of freedom and playfulness in lightness. A sense of opportunity and creativity. Our breath seems to come more easily, and the air feels cleaner and more refreshing when we feel light. And the good news is that there seems to be a pretty clear place to start in becoming light, both in a moment and in general. Lately I’ve been collecting some ideas to foster our lightness – there are four of them here. To call them ‘steps’ is not a great description because it implies that there is something to do to lighten up. There really isn’t. Rather it seems lightness comes to us on its own accord as we become aware of our patterns and tendencies, perceptions and understandings that make us feel heavy. So I think each of these is better described as an awareness. Here is what I’m learning…

Listen to the podcast version of this post below

Awareness #1: Living someone else’s life

A sense of direction

At times in our lives each of us feels without direction. It is quite unsettling to feel this way. No one enjoys feeling unsettled. So in our desire to feel grounded and with direction, we make choices. When we make choices while feeling unsettled, most often those are choices toward grounding. Toward feeling secure, and this commonly means that the choices are made with some degree of fear woven into the mix. We know by now that this is completely natural, these choices toward safety in the midst of confusion.

Beyond an example

When we make choices from this place of safety, they can easily come from desires that others want FOR us – our parents or our friends. They may come from viewing siblings or peers or some people who have come before us – people we’ve read about or heard about, and it’s then easy to conflate their paths with our own. It is super easy to do, because quite honestly none of us really knows what to do, and really there is nothing wrong with taking example from others. But it’s also easy to take the example beyond example, and therein lose our way.

Creating from the surface

In our modern world the focus is on what we can achieve with the power of our thinking minds, and in this way there must be something to do, and so we do it. We create and do things, often from the surface level of what we can see in front of us and around us. We also know that choices made from this place – a place that desires safety and familiarity and direction, if done so over and over again in isolation from practices that help us to truly know and trust ourselves, ultimately serve to distract us from our path to authentic happiness.

Someone else’s life

With a life created in this way – a life that is admittedly super easy for us to create, at some point there comes a time when we aren’t quite sure that we are spending our days how we are meant to be spending them. And if this feeling continues without some new choices from a new place, we can begin to feel that the life that we are living is not our own. That these are someone else’s goals. Someone else’s dreams. This is beyond feeling unsettled. This is beyond confusion. This is actually an authentic feeling of ‘wrongness’. Not in the black and white sense of right and wrong, No. In the sense of being out of alignment with who we truly are.

Such good news

It does not feel good initially, but this ‘wrong’ feeling is a really good sign – a sign that we are opening into a place inside of us that has been happinly awaiting our arrival. There is nothing to do with this feeling, other than to allow it to be. This is a wonderful awareness to have because it means we are beginning to get in touch with who we truly are and who we are meant to be. And with this awareness, new options begin to present themselves, options that we would not have seen before.

Awareness #2: Desire for what others have

Short changed

Have you ever found yourself saying to a friend, about another friend, “Yeah, I’m really happy for him”…but in your mind you know that you don’t genuinely feel that way? It is a heavy feeling to sit and feel as if we have been short changed. That somehow others have it better than we do, and we want the things that they have. Someone else’s relationship looks better than ours. Someone else has more friends. Someone else has a closer knit family. Someone else lives in a place that is warmer, cooler, sunnier, friendlier, nicer. Someone else has a more attractive body -thinner, more muscular, more fit. Someone else has better health – more vibrant, energetic, strong. Someone has a nicer home with better things inside. Nice cars. Someone else has an excellent and fulfilling career. Someone else has time for meditation, yoga, long walks on the beach. The list is endless when we focus on the people around us.

Security

All of this desire for what others are or have or do is based on some sense of insecurity about the path of our own lives. And of course none of this matters. Again there is nothing to do, but to be aware, without judgement, of this way of looking at ourselves and our lives through the lens of the people around us. Letting go of something always begins with becoming aware of it. Discovering what DOES matter is the path of each of us individually. All of this surface level desire is simply an invitation to begin our path on the inside. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could look at the people around us and genuinely be happy for them. We can. And the good news is that as more of us engage in this discovering, the lighter we all become.

Awareness #3: Blame and resentment

Two common, and really heavy results or byproducts of ignoring this awareness – the awareness of a life not of our authentic choosing or a continuous desire for what others have, are blame and resentment. You see the first two awarenesses it seems are a natural result of living with other humans on our planet right now – you are not a bad person if you come to realize that some things that you have achieved or some goals that you have set really aren’t aligned with your true path. And you are not a bad person if you see someone else’s cozy home in a magazine and spend a few moments picturing that home as your own. But if we choose to remain asleep. If we allow this awareness to come and go unchecked for long periods of time, then it gets really hard to be light.

A most liberating awareness

It is quite possible and common for us to blame others, sometime those closest to us, for the path that we are not yet on. We can begin to resent others, as we perceive them as playing a part in or as somehow responsible for that which we do not have. Again, this does not make us bad human beings. Just human. But our focus is outward, on other humans, and not inward toward ourselves. If we turn inward and discover that blame and resentment have found their way to us, the awareness of them can be wholly liberating. It is liberating because they are really super duper heavy. Heavy as the earth. So the letting go of this kind of heaviness can be so lightening as to have us floating. Dancing. And the dancing begins, as always, with awareness.

Awareness #4: Emphasis on our story line

Drive through awareness

This may actually be the most available awareness. Unlike the previous three, which can seep into parts of us that require quite a bit of time and space to uncover, it seems we can tell pretty easily when we’re caught up in the drama of our lives. We’re running around like a headless chicken with no time for ourselves, or we’re emotional to the point of feeling ridiculous, or we otherwise just can’t seem to get hold of ourselves. It’s fairly obvious and it seems to take very little – a sunrise or a sunset, the view of a mountain, a baby’s giggle or a visit from a hummingbird, to snap us out of the theater of our life and into something bigger. It’s a wonderfully simple awareness, and it touches all of us. I think that it is what we do with these moments of awareness that make the difference.

A progression of awareness

We can ignore the sunrise in front of us and focus on the email that just came in, along with the story and the tasks and the theater that came with it. Or, we can notice the sunrise, appreciate it momentarily, and then look at our email. Or, we can notice the sunrise, appreciate it and fully let it in to affect us somewhere beyond our eyes, and then look at our email. Or, we can notice the sunrise and let it in and allow it in to such a degree that it feeds us throughout our entire day and affects every interaction that we have with every person who we meet, including the person on the other end of that email. We can allow it to affect our choices and our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions – how we operate from moment to moment as a human being connected to other human beings and all beings on Earth and beyond. I think that anything, save that very first one about ignoring the sunrise all together, is a win.

Lightening up

As we begin to see more clearly and become more aware of ourselves, we can do so without judgement. We do so with self compassion and kindness toward ourselves. Whether it is meditation or yoga or mindfulness or personal development of any kind, it seems the practice of observing and seeing and becoming more aware of ourselves and our presence here, is the way of lightness. Is the way to begin to lighten up already. So the next time someone tells you, either kindly or otherwise to lighten up, maybe you can just say, quite authentically, “yes, thank you, I’m working on it”.

For what it’s worth, and for the knowing that all is well.

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