Day 90 - A New Me, A New Reality

These past 90 days have been some of the most transformative days of my life. And even though I haven't been chronicling here as regularly as I had planned, deep shifts have happened on the inside and the outside. I believe what's most conspicuous is that I'm seeing more and more of my shortcomings. Not from a self-flagellating point of view, but I see how distorted my sense of reality has been through my deepened meditation practice. Buddha said that all humans are delusional and that delusion is one of the three poisons (together with greed and hatred) according to Buddhism. C.G Jung talked about our core delusions (the ones that stem from a childhood wound that we keep perpetuating) and how they run our lives. In any 12-step program, the focus is on letting go of the delusion that things will change, and be much better, tomorrow. For example, we are in denial of our addiction and we believe we can quit tomorrow, or in a business context, we are in denial about our tendency to focus on the potential of tomorrow's business opportunity and forgetting the power of what lies beneath our feet.

Looking at myself from this perspective is pretty tough. There are a lot of things that I didn't want to see and accept about myself. Yet at the same time, it's also beautifully liberating. For example, after accepting that I'm a dreamer, yes maybe a visionary as well, but someone who is much more comfortable living in the future than in the now, it's also easy to see how negatively this has impacted my life. In a sense you can say that it's about forfeiting our present moment to gain an imagined future. And of course I'm not the only one who bets on the allure of how amazing the next vacation will be, or wear the rosy-colored glasses of how life will when we are skinny, or have met 'the One', or imagine how great life will be when we've gotten funded. After accepting this delusion, the process of seeking out the moments and the how, instead of chasing outcomes starts. For me, this will take time, yet I'm floored how much a small shift in perception has changed life for the better for me.

So in short, I feel incredibly fortunate, humbled and deeply optimistic about myself, life and the planet. If I can change this much in such a short period of time, what if this was multiplied by hundreds and then thousands?