Emptying your full glass to live a full life

The paradox:

To live with a glass half full with the best stuff mindset, you need to half empty your mind. 

The most obvious infraction: 

Knowing it all.
Know-it-alls walk around with their minds filled to the brim. There's room for nothing else until something forces some of it to spill out. 

The less obvious things we lean into that blocks us from receiving the amazing potentialities of life:

• The need to stay totally and continually “informed” by having the news and social media on all day. They fill our minds with fear and a negative, polarized, binary sense of reality. No one is immune to this impact.
• Overdoing being “well read.” Knowledge is important! But without turning it all into action, it can be deceptive (it tends to make us think we did stuff), elusive (as it relates to creating a fulfilled life), and therefore can cause stuckness and cognitive dissonance. There, I said it. Get mad at me.
  
• Judgment... is a momentary lapse into know-it-all-ness. Not to be confused with discernment. 
• Saying, “That doesn’t work for me” instead of “how can that work for me?”
• Saying, “Been there done that,” rather than “how is this different?" or "how can I experience this differently this time?”
• Excuses aka shame, blame, and justifications. Another momentary lapse into know-it-all-ness. Except this is about what you think you know about your current self. 
• Emotional steeling to protect yourself from getting hurt rather than holding things accountable.
• Saying, “It is what it is” instead of “what new opportunities, choices, and experiences come with this that I hadn’t considered before?”
  

Observe when you immediately take the other side of a statement or argument. Did you really mean to? Or are you on autopilot because that’s been your modality for 30 years? Or because you think you know the other side, and you’ve no interest in what they have to say?

Meditation practice empties the mind, so to speak. It isn’t limiting. It’s expansive, all-inclusive, patient, and compassionate. It looks for what is as opportunities to see beauty, defines healthy boundaries, and gives rise to spontaneity, trust, and capacity to take risks. It’s not there to hide behind the “knowing”. It’s there to remind you that while YOU are your ultimate guru, everyone you come into contact with (both in real life and digitally), and every experience that comes to you, is also there to teach and reflect you and your journey.

Keep on emptying so you can take in new, updated, dynamic, real life information and experiences. You’ll be all the wiser, awake, and happier for it.

❤️ Savitree