My biggest power play in liFe
My most courageous personal development move in life thus far, has been to give up personal development in its entirety. But I had to spend almost my entire adult life ‘developing myself’ first to realize it was my deepest trap and consequent liberator.
There is a great unifying theory of all existence by the genius neuroscientist Karl Friston, which he calls ‘the free energy principle’. By reducing the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs, is to ‘minimize free energy’.
This principle is so complex, yet so complete and simple. My entire adult personal development A-type ambition has been characterized by ‘expectations of what I should be’ versus what I am or what my sensory input is telling me. The brain has this problem built into its very evolving perceptory engine.
My 2yr old baby boy Leo doesn’t seem to suffer from this expectation, and his ‘free energy’ is minimized as he simply is what he is, and he’s rapidly evolving since he was a single cell organism and now a temper tantrum toddler.
Somewhere down the life rabbit hole I believed I was stuck, needed development or healing and began reading, therapy, attending courses, seminars, retreats and leadership training. My boy is simply curious and learns 24/4 but I felt I was not enough, and my learning would lead to some form of outcome and success.
I even bought into this spiritual bull of ‘self actualization’. Some destination where I would become my ‘authentic self’. I blindly bought into a multi billion dollar health, spiritual and personal development industry which really serves a single purpose. The realization that you ‘don’t need it anymore’ even though there are great lessons and experiences everywhere in reality available to me every waking second. This is the function of evolution playing out every moment.
What feels more true to me now, is that I have always been expanding since birth, my first word, my first love, and now as a seasoned entrepreneur, husband and new father. I have always been becoming and always will, and now seemingly ‘minimizing free energy’ as my perception expands into greater experiences of reality which I will never fully realize as it’s infinite. I will suffer more deaths, more love, more pain and joy, more success and failure and forever expanding.
My expectations of the ‘person I should / could be’ created a persona, an act, which created a friction to what I am as a full spectrum (and sometimes not pleasant) human being. That friction remains, but is reducing and paradoxically speeding up my own natural expansion at a pace which at times feels comfortable, and at other times, on my edge of my sanity. My extremes are lessoning, particularly because I’m exponentially more sensitive and grounded.
So, consider dropping all the striving. The management books, the meditations, the positivity, the drive for health, love, life and wealth. All the bullshit sold by others to: ‘do more’, achieve more, and scratch that extra 10% of performance. Perhaps even allow your fear, your shame, your busy-ness, failed relationships and fat rolls not be fixed. Allow your trying to surrender, acceptance of life, and anxiety and your anger to be there too.
By minimizing that expectation of yourself and what you are meant to be, versus the sensory input your brain, body, emotions and feelings are telling you, there is possibly a space unvisited. There is something vacate many years ago to visit again, sit and be curious about. A space where you have no control, no fake steering wheel and only a place to rest in uncertainty. A place where god can laugh at your plans, but you feel that there are some plans you can make. A strange tension.
It’s unknown, it’s a mystery, it’s unfolding as an experience, with no guarantees and there is nothing to hold on to. It’s a place where your beating heart is felt, where you meet yourself and your loved ones, where your body resides and where it will be no longer in some distant future. It’s right here and now. It’s perfect only because it’s imperfect and it’s just you.