Thinking in Definitions

We get stuck way to easily in our thoughts, in our definitions. In the struggle between security and insecurity we are constantly looking for some definition of ourselves which will justify our existence, and then we get kind of addicted to it, because it gives us some justification for being here. We define ourselves by degrees, occupations, color, race, religion, marital status, parental status....on and on the list goes.

At any given moment you can belong to 1000 different categories and that is all well and fine except that eventually those categories start becoming confinement areas, prisons, if you so will. When we think in terms of these definitions, we have left the present moment. We get stuck in how [definition] is meant to respond to the current stimuli and promptly start missing the opportunity to breathe in and examine the moment as it is without preconceptions and experiential memories of moments that were.

In the mind-body-spirit connection, very often pain is an alert tool which is ever so kindly alerting us to the fact that there is something stuck somewhere, and often that is in the thinking processes. Being stuck on definitions is a problem of the mind. You say, "I am this..." and suddenly it confines you so that you can't be anything else. The act of defining becomes the prison that holds you back from being what you can become. And that is painful.

Instead of creating definitions that herd us into prison walls, we can look deeper to the place of insecurity and find coping mechanisms that don't rely on externally defined parameters to give us justification for our existence. "If God could have made anything better than you, He would have." You are created in the image of God, you are beautiful and you have the right to be here. It is up to you to live the glory of God that you are - that is not something you can define externally, it is being who you really are, and that is strictly within.

Today you have the opportunity to take in life and experience it in its fullness exactly the way it is without condemning it to the prison walls of definitions, principles and learned responses. You can take the moment for what it is, you can be who you really are without struggling or straining to be something you are not by celebrating who you are. Choose well.

Blessings.
- Darshan

© 2009 Darshan F Jessop