Aranya and The Pixies Mastery in this Lifetime

from Aranya

Don’t worry, be happy. Sounds irresponsible? It isn’t. I do like this line; it’s very good. What do you do when your carefully laid plans—your career, your family, your perfect marriage in your perfect house all start to unravel? Even the perfect path unravels: “I was sure I had found my guru, and then I found out that my guru was sleeping with everything and anyone who moves. And now my path has unraveled.” What do you do when your life unravels?

None of this would be a problem if you were living “now.” It’s only a problem when the perfect wife or husband was a plan, when the perfect romance was a plan, when the perfect career was a plan. If you are living now and it changes, well, it just changes: “It looked like this, and now it looks like this.”

Suppose that your perfect path—the path which you were sure meant that you would pledge your soul to your guru and follow in your guru’s footsteps and do everything you were told for the rest of your lifetime--blows up because:  

1. Your guru turns out to be a charlatan;

2. Your guru turns out not to follow the guru’s rules, saying, “Oh, the rules are for you, not for me”; or

3. Your guru goes and dies on you, and you can’t communicate with him or her.

So, what do you do? Well, if you’ve been living now, you say, “So long, guru.” And then you take the next step: “I used to have a guru. Before that I was guru-less. Then I had a guru, and now I am guru-less again. That is my path.” But instead of this, you guys whine, “My guru has screwed up my path!” No, your guru was part of your path, and now the path has taken a turn to the left. So, either you can jump up and down and say, “But I don’t want to go left. Everything is screwed up. This is terrible! It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Or you can turn left.

You people jump up and down, yell and scream, rend your mantle, put ashes on your forehead, and write letters to the editor. And you tell the world how you are being betrayed by your guru. What an interesting path! And then when you are all done, you turn left anyway.

Now, if you decide to rend your mantle and yell and scream and be betrayed and all of that stuff, that is part of your path. It’s a yes/no test. This is the hardest part. We like to remind you over and over and over again that everything is an option. Victimhood is an option.

Let’s say that you were just stabbed. You can say either, “So-and-so stabbed me,” or “I was stabbed.” Period. “There was a stabbing that took place, and I happen to have been the one that was stabbed. I have a hole in me, and I think I’d like to go have it sewn up before I leak all over the place.”

It is optional how you take it. It’s up to you how you decide to deal with change. And the energy is just going to keep coming up behind you and shoving you. So if you have your feet firmly planted and pointed in the direction you think you want to be going, the energy of shift will whack you on the shoulder and you’ll go careening off in another direction. You might even fall flat on your face.

You are fond of saying, “Times are really tough. I know I’m having a terrible time, and the energy just keeps pushing me around.” What to do? Take off your brakes. Get limber. Learn to roll with the energy. Be prepared to change. My advice is this: If you’ve got to be prepared, be prepared to change everything and anything at all times.