The term “quiet quitting” has become a known phenominon. If you’re at a breaking point with your routine, career, or just life, you’re not alone.
Most of us reach a point where we feel completely exhausted, drained from trying to keep up with everything we think we should be doing.
When we’re there we look at two options.
One option is to keep going, push through, try harder, go for the next big thing, thinking that that will give us energy, satisfaction, happiness.
The other option is to walk away, quit, give up, be a failure. Being lost in the fear that things will fall apart. What will people say? What will happen? How will I feel about myself?
But what we often don’t see is there’s another option, and that option is to let go, not give up and quit, but surrender to life and not be trapped by our mind’s prison of obligation.
The Conditioning That Traps Us
We live in a world that has always been one that places the value of ourselves on what we do, what we can achieve and how we can provide results.
We look to tangible things, things we can look at, hold, and point to. Our minds are only able to conceive that value is contained on the outside based on what we can see and feel and touch with our senses.
The mind will do what it can only do, which is to look for these solutions outside of ourselves. That constant seeking and searching for results or answers creates stress and tension. We can feel that in the body. We can feel it in our mind and our mood, stress and our anger and our disappointment. We internalize the results.
Any perceived lack becomes evidence of our own lack of value.
In this early conditioning, we’re also taught that if we don’t keep up and maintain or produce or exceed or excel, that we’re doing something wrong.
We’re not fitting in. We’re not like other people. Winners, we’re taught, are those that self sacrifice and defy odds, push themselves to the limit.
These messages and conditioning can only move one direction. That direction is more, more effort, more doing, more trying. And if we don’t feel right, our mind says something must be wrong with us.
The Function of the Mind
But if I can see that my mind works like any other part of the body, any other system in the body, that has a program that serves a function. These functions are not changeable.
We would never ask our heart to stop beating, our digestive system to stop processing food, our lungs to stop breathing. Why would we ask and think that our mind would stop thinking or looking for solutions and looking for answers outside of ourselves?
My greater consciousness and awareness has the ability to observe the mind. Then, if we choose to allow ourselves to let go, the body follows. The nervous system follows. It can relax, insights can come. Movement happens like a dance. The best dancing doesn’t happen by thinking. It happens by allowing.
Our mind wants to control, seek, search, but it will never find the ultimate answer, because it simply does not exist through efforting or doing or over thinking.
A Pattern of Self Discipline
When I was a teenager, I decided to start lifting weights. That exercise discipline followed me into the military, and now where I still push my body and exercise regularly. It’s part fun and enjoyment and part programmed routine. I’ve taken that enjoyment and discipline and applied it to other aspects of my life.
I’m older now and I’ve noticed resistance with my usual regimens. One part of me wants to stick through my chosen routine thats produced results, and one part of me wants to do something different.
The tension point arises. Am I quitting? Or can I let go and go with where my desire is leading me?
What if I don’t feel like doing what I usually do?
Nothing is actually at stake. Just my conditioned thoughts telling me I’m not following the usualy pattern if I choose something different.
The pressure is coming from my own mind and my thoughts telling me there’s a right way, there’s a disciplined way. There’s not an outside source, or people, telling me I’m “wrong”.
But my mind is there telling me I’m “missing out” or I’m “slacking off”.
Only in my mind, do I think I’m missing out on something. Or that things are going to fall apart.
I’m I quitting or am I listening to a deeper voice and desire? Either way, there’s a risk in making the decision.
The Risk of Letting Go
We are really not able to avoid risk. We think that we are avoiding risk by doing the things that we should be doing, yet we are taking a risk by not listening to our body and intuition. And the mind perceives the risk of letting go and allowing, trusting.
But it’s with letting go that we can receive a new or alternative way of being that our soul is wanting to experience, even though our mind doesn’t understand.
The mind wants to prove worth and value through performing and doing, and it thinks, if that happens, we will be attaining value or worth, maybe through productivity, maybe through achievement, maybe through proving to ourself that we can do it.
But taking that risk and letting go and stepping into the space of being connected with life and God and all that is and ever was will always be enough, because it cannot be otherwise.
It’s not the striving and discipline that keeps us on track. It’s the practice of taking a risk, of letting go that gets our soul back in alignment with divine flow.
The Practice
This choice, this risk, this ability to let go, not quit, but let go is available to us every moment. We just have to be able to see it.
Life is demanding enough. The things that are there for you to do will always be there. The to do “list” doesn’t ever get completed.
What if you took the time to do what you wanted to do? Then listen to how you feel and respond when you allow instead of force. Take a risk to let go and see where it leads you.
Peace to you,
John
Men’s Coach
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