Add & Subtract - Will

Today’s theme is our Will

The Cambridge Dictionary defines ‘will’ as:

“The mental power used to control and direct your thoughts and actions, or a determination to do something, despite any difficulties or opposition”

ADD RESPONSIBILITY

I saw a meme the other day: “to not make a decision is a decision”! It suggests we are always making choices, and those choices become our reality. But how many of those choices are we making consciously, deliberately, from love?

It is essential that we realise how our thoughts determine our feelings and actions; that we are, consciously or unconsciously, creating our lives moment by moment.

Understanding this, we can use our will more deliberately to steer our ship in the direction we want to go. We must claim our power, our creative capacity, our authority as the author of our own life, in order to have the life we want.

Let us take full responsibility for ourselves, practice the intentional use of our will, and strengthen our ability to move through challenges into self-directed freedom.

Suggestion: Take a quiet moment to feel the life-force moving through you. Realise that once childhood is over, it is completely up to you how you direct that life-force to deal with people, meet difficulties and respond to situations.

Notice how the burden of responsibility also brings the power to change things, the freedom of choice to be how you want to be in the world.

From a spiritual classic first published in 1955, the Urantia Book:

“Mind is your ship, the adjuster [spirit] is your pilot, the human will is captain”

Source: The Urantia Book (Urania Foundation, Chicago. Urantia is the spiritual name for earth)

SUBTRACT VICTIMHOOD

As a child we are ‘victims’ in the sense of being dependent, helpless and virtually powerless. If there is enough love and safety for the infant, and gentle learning around boundaries and the needs of others as we grow, we move through those stages of development. Without those conditions being met, parts of us stay stuck in child, which keeps us looking to others to meet our needs.

Victimhood is so unhelpful (and unattractive) in adults, because it shows that self-responsibility has not been achieved, the will not developed as a conscious tool. Rather than captaining our lives, we are still expecting others, parents, employers, governments to look after us. Weak, compliant, easily exploited by others.

Suggestion: What parts of you are stuck in child? Where was your development stalled by trauma, abuse, neglect? How are you still hoping a ‘parent’ will steer the ship for you?

Imagine you have already done the shadow work to heal the wounded parts inside. Feel what is would be like to step into your full adult power, claim your authority and use your will to chart your course?

It is possible because it is your inherent capacity. It just takes work, practice and conscious choices.

From William Shakespeare:

“Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills”

Source: Othello