It’s What You do With It…

When I was 13 years old, I went to a summer camp where I studied theater and dreamed of being an actress. It was my third and last year there, and the years before I had had some pretty good roles in small plays. That year they decided to produce The Wizard of Oz.

Given my experience, I thought I would be cast as one of the witches or some role with some significance. To my horror, I was cast as a munchkin! That whole month I felt humiliated and disappointed and like it was all a waste of my time. After the final performance for the families, kids signed each others’ programs, like a yearbook. The director, Mike Miller wrote on my program the words that became the guiding philosophy of my life, “it’s what you do with it…”

When we approach our experiences from the perspective of them being neither positive nor negative but simply what they are, when we know that what is really important is what we do with it, how we show up to what does occur, then we are in a different relationship to reality. One of my favorite astrologers and philosophers is Michael Lennox. He recently wrote – referring to how people expect him to know how this (2018) midterm election was going to go – “I don’t know what’s going to happen, and what’s more, I live in a Consciousness in which it doesn’t matter what happens. The only thing that matters is how I show up to what does occur. And that is the focus of my practice day in and day out.”

What if we let our focus be on how we show up, on what we do with it all… What if we stopped arguing with reality, stopped resisting what is and just accepted it. As Byron Katie says, “every time I argue with reality I lose!”

We live in a dualistic world, a dynamic that is being accentuated in these days of polarizing Us and Them… It is so easy to polarize everything. So easy to categorize things as good or bad and forget that it’s what we do with each experience, how we meet it, how we are present to it and how we act on it.

Yours in Peace and Showing Up,

Carol