Allow!

Life reminds me a lot of high school, where we went to
different rooms with different teachers to learn different
subjects. And then there was homeroom, that place where we
gathered every morning to 'check in', get the
miscellaneous non-'technical' information we needed to go
through the day, greet our friends and, if we were lucky,
get our homework done.

I think life is exactly like that. The classrooms don't
have seats lined up in neat columns and rows, however.
They're just wherever we happen to be. The teachers are
whomever we happen to be with. And the subjects are as
varied as we are. Luckily, we weren't given a 'schedule'
on that first day of life. Most of us would have opted for
permanent truancy, finding an 'alternative' school
somewhere on some distant and simpler planet.

The homeroom of life? That inner space where we check in
with ourselves, assimilating all the varied lessons,
sifting through the monumental stack of incoming data,
incorporating that which 'feels right' into our daily
lives, relegating that which doesn't to some archived
file, hopefully never to be seen again. How do we get to
our homeroom? By meditation, breathing, sitting with
nature, running, dancing -- whatever it is that puts us in
perfect peace and harmony with ourselves.

And in life, as in school, there are home-room teachers.
Not really teachers, of course, but administrators and
facilitators. In our calm and centered place, we find
objects or individuals who represent our highest wisdom.
They may be faceless and nameless or may have form,
substance and history. They may be a synthesis of all wise
people we have come across or they may be individuals who
lived and breathed and represent the pinnacle of some
quality we value.

These teachers may play different roles in our life. For
example, there are four separate energies I connect to when
I meditate. Although I often think of them collectively,
they each represent one of the four major divisions of
life: Mental, Emotional, Spiritual, and Physical. One,
representing the Mental sphere, helped me open doors I
didn't know where there, allowing me to learn that oneness
with all creation is possible. Another, representing the
Spiritual realm and through his teaching of unconditional
love, has helped me experience that oneness. A third,
representing the Emotional, well, he has given me practical
advice for living that oneness.

And yet the main lessons I've learned from this third
teacher are very simple, so simple that I almost missed
them: the first is to allow and the second is to live in
the moment. Sounds easy, doesn't it? That's what I
thought, too.

After being exposed to the teachings of an Eastern
philosopher, I found that I could remember only one phrase:
'All we need do is allow'. Allow what? He didn't say, so
I concluded that I had to figure out that part by myself
(we all know how contrary some teachers can be -- they want
us to do all the work!).

I started by trying to finish the sentence. Allow others to
be who they are? Of course, but that seemed limiting. Allow
others to be? Better, but not quite right. Allow others.
Allow them what? And that brought me back to allow, just
allow. The same thing happened with 'Allow me to be who I
am'.

No matter how I tried to finish the sentence, I kept coming
back to that simple word, all by itself, no qualifiers.

No qualifiers? Just allow everything and everyone? But some
of those people and things are a little crazy. Do I allow
them to be crazy? Well, why not? For some reason that I
can't understand, they have chosen to be crazy. It
needn't affect me, not if I can understand there is a
lesson in craziness for them. I have my own lessons and I
know I would like others to allow me to learn those lessons
the way I need to learn them, the way that I will learn
them.

Allowing includes allowing me to be me. And by allowing
myself the full range of human emotions, by being a person
who loves, gets angry, knows joy, feels resentment, cries,
feels tired, experiences satisfaction, in fact by feeling
every emotion and admitting (and therefore owning) that
emotion, then I can be a 'perfect' human being. For that
whole range of emotions is part of the human experience,
and keeping those 'unacceptable' (by whom?) feelings
bottled up, I'm only short-changing myself.

And I've noticed that people who never allow themselves to
get angry are really always angry, the proverbial fire keg
ready to explode. Yet how many times have I noticed that
'getting it out of my system', through yelling or tears,
does actually that, it gets that feeling out of my system!
Experiencing the feeling isn't bad, it's living it,
staying in that negative mood that's unhealthy.

And allowing ourselves to feel, really feel, the emotion
we're experiencing is what living in the moment is all
about. Yet there's a big difference between living in the
moment and living for the moment. There's no sense of
purpose in living for, while living in allows us to take all
the information we need from this moment, whether it be
joyful or sad, and bring it into our next moment.

I found myself worrying about staying in the moment,
worrying that I wouldn't 'move on' with my life. But the
more experience I get at living in the moment, I find that
I make better, more informed decisions about what the next
moment will be. Better decisions than when I spend all of
this moment worrying about what happened yesterday or
what's going to happen in the future.

And moments are controllable! When I live in the moment, the
decision to stay, or move on, is definitely something that
is in my hands -- and moments I can handle. Yet each moment
is a forever, when we are truly in it. Learning to allow
and to live in the moment is, I'm finding, anything but
simple. Or perhaps I should say it's incredibly simple,
just not easy!

It's hard to break the old habits of fear and guilt, but
the more I can do that, the more assured I am that that's
the way I want to live. How do you start? By noticing where
your attention is at any given moment. For example, this
moment, right now, is about reading this article. If you can
remember what I've written, the essence of it, then
you're living in the moment. If you can't, then take a
deep breath and read it again. Then check in. Do you
remember the gist now? Congratulations! And welcome to the
moment!