There are four women I’d like to introduce you to.
The first three women are dealing with internal struggles and/or a lack of power. They are anxious and/or unable to create what they want in the world.
The fourth woman can already see through the distinction I am going to share with you. As a direct result of her embodying this distinction, she has access to not only a more peaceful and loving experience of life but has exponentially more power to create as well.
Meet Joan.
She owns a neighborhood laundromat and is constantly frustrated with practically everything. When someone cuts her off in traffic, it ruins her morning. Despite her frequent reminders to be on time, her employees consistently show up late. She believes she just has bad luck since this problem has shown up with pretty much everyone she’s ever hired. Vendors are always chasing her for money too. She works most weekends since there is always so much to get done, but when she manages to get a weekend off, it always rains. In fact, it doesn’t seem to matter where she is, because it even rains when she goes away on vacation.
In her home life, Joan deals with a husband and kids who don’t pull their weight. The grass overgrows unless she nags him about it. She hates nagging but does it because it’s the only way to get through to him. On Thursday nights, she inevitably finds herself dragging the trash bins out to the curb despite it being the kids’ responsibility.
Joan deals with all this by reminding herself to have a ‘positive attitude’, which for her is expressed by constantly apologizing “I’m sorry. I’ll get to that ASAP” and saying things like “It’s OK. Let’s just try harder next time.” When she speaks these things, however, on the inside she is stewing.
She hates the idea of thinking lowly about her kids and husband and so whenever she notices thoughts of this kind, she pushes them out of her mind. With her employees though, she gives herself more room to think these things. Often she will just sit in her office expressing her disbelief at how incompetent the people around her are.
Meet Susan.
She is an entrepreneur, investor and consultant who always gets her way and makes a lot of stuff happen. She signs up clients and wins deals through how powerfully she commands the space she is in. People trust her because of her certainty and commitment.
Meanwhile, Susan is constantly annoyed with pretty much everyone. For her, people are an obstacle to be overcome. Nobody is really ‘for her’ and so she figures she needs to fight.
In Susan’s mind, the world is a kind of battlefield. Books like ‘The 48 Laws of Power’ and the ‘The Art of War’ sit on her coffee table as a testament to her commitment to playing the game to win. For a woman in her late 30’s, she’s amassed an impressive track record of successes, before becoming a recognized name in the intellectual property space, she had already created a name for herself as a powerful trial attorney.
She considers the anxiety she lives with to be something that simply comes with the success she has and so she deals with it by going to boxing class at 6am every morning and making sure she gets out to the bar with friends on both Friday and Saturday nights.
If Susan is away from work for too long, she finds herself thinking about getting into another romantic relationship, but also wonders if maybe that’s just not for her since the last one ended when after a couple years of trying for a baby and it not working out, she decided her partner wasn’t ‘OK’ enough with this and split off from him.
Meet Clara.
She is in the midst of figuring out what’s next for her in life while being financially supported by her boyfriend. Clara is at peace most of the time. She says ‘yes’ to life and just sort of floats through it.
Clara burns lots of candles and incense and has many spiritual objects around her home to remind her to ‘let go and love’. She attends new age spiritual growth workshops and meditates regularly, or at least she intends to. She also has a large library of spiritual books which are beautifully organized on a bookshelf that she bought at Ikea.
Clara spends her mornings drinking tea and doing yoga, with numerous breaks to check her social media accounts when notifications pop-up or to share images of the tea she is drinking and the yoga pose she is doing.
Everyone who knows Clara wants to meet with her for coffee so they can ‘chat’. They tell her she’s such a great listener and that they feel so comfortable with her and connected to her. She has a way of making everyone she meets feel loved. A number of her friends have suggested that she become a ‘life coach’ because she is so good at helping people relax and love themselves.
Clara is in a relationship that she enjoys. She thinks the world of her partner for how committed he is to his goals, even though that’s ‘not her thing’. For her, goal-setting is contradictory to her spiritual path. While she admires her partner, she does see him as less ‘spiritually evolved’ than her because of how much his focus is ‘out there’.
In quiet moments, like for example when there are no notifications popping up on her phone, she can feel a sense of emptiness inside her belly and a longing in her heart. She catches herself wishing she hadn’t agreed with her partner to move from LA to NYC, but she considers this a kind of resistance to ‘what is’ and so she just practices breathing until the thoughts move away. She repeats this every time a thought like this returns.
Often the thoughts don’t come back, but some of them seem to persist, like the one that says ‘maybe she shouldn’t spend so much time having coffee with people’. She thinks sometimes about going back to school and finishing her Master’s degree, but that would mean getting another job to pay for it and after having been turned down at three interviews in a row, she can see the signs that the Universe has other plans for her.
“Making money must just not be my thing”, she thinks as she closes her eyes, touches her middle fingers to her thumbs, turns her palms up and chants “Oooooommmmmmmm”.
What Are They Not Seeing?
Let’s look at them in reverse.
In many ways, Clara is on it spiritually. This is evidenced by how people are drawn to her and how they feel after spending time with her. She has very little internal resistance to what’s occurring outside of her and in this, she finds much peace and ease in life. What she is failing to experience though is a deep fulfillment of her own potential. She has little distinction between thoughts that come from fear (which limit her) and thoughts that emerge as a genuine expression of her heart’s desire. Without this distinction, she trusts nothing inside her and allows the flow of life outside her to be the only determining factor in her life path. She is light and free, but also a leaf in the wind.
Susan, on the other hand, is crushing life. She is high-achieving and high-producing. What she wants, she makes happen. She also has little distinction between what she would love and what she fears, but her way of dealing is to honor all of it through action. If she desires something, she does something about it. If she fears something, she does something about it. Every internal experience she has is managed through manipulating the world around her and she’s become very adept at it. The downside though is that she lives with an ambient anxiety that is perpetually unfulfilling and also creates chronic stress in her body making the reproduction she deep down longs for close to impossible. While she may be crushing life, life is also crushing her.
Joan, poor Joan, is suffering both of the challenges that Clara and Susan face. Not only is she absent of any awareness as to how she creates and carries anxiety in her body, but she allows herself to be walked all over by everybody in her life too. It’s a wonder she’s even been able to create a business that produces a profit, albeit a very small one. She doesn’t like the idea of upsetting or bothering people and certainly doesn’t have any time for ‘spiritual growth’ because there’s too much for her to do ‘out there’ first.
What Would it Serve Them To See?
All three of these women are missing awareness of the following distinction:
Allow Everything. Accommodate Very Little.
To allow something means to have no internal resistance to it. To ‘allow everything’ thus means that whatever happens is totally OK with you – on the inside. If someone cuts you off, that’s OK. If you get sick, that’s OK. If your house gets burgled, that’s OK. If a loved one dies, that’s OK. Allowing everything is not about how you respond – it is not about what you do on the outside. It is simply about your internal experience. Do you have and engage in thinking that resists what has occurred or do you welcome it with equanimity?
To accommodate something means to give time and space to it. To ‘accommodate very little’ thus means to provide very little time or space to what others want from you. It means that you say ‘no’ to most requests that others make of you. It means that you do not settle for people not honoring their word. It means that what YOU would love to do, experience and create gets most, if not ALL, of your time.
As we can see, Clara is ‘allowing everything’, but she’s also ‘accommodating nearly everything’ too. This is what has her be at peace, but also distant from her own truth and totally disempowered as a creator in her life.
Susan, on the other hand, is ‘accommodating very little’, but she is also ‘allowing nothing’. Her internal resistance to everything that occurs, which she responds to by taking action, has her in reaction all of the time. She is creating powerfully, but not from love and certainly not in a way that provides freedom, fulfillment or access to her greatest power.
Joan is doing the complete opposite of this distinction. She is ‘allowing nothing’ and ‘accommodating nearly everything’. She is filled with internal resistance and letting everything ‘out there’ direct her life.
Meet Nancy.
She’s a very successful real estate broker and developer who transforms properties from disheveled dumps into masterpieces. Sellers love her, buyers love her and other brokers love her too. She shows up at meetings unhurried and with a genuine smile on her face. When people speak with her, she listens to them deeply, intently and completely. People often say to her things like “you’re such a good listener” or “I can’t believe I’m telling you all this personal stuff.” She spends very little money on advertising since her business runs mostly on referrals. Similar to Clara people want to be around her. And similar to Susan, she creates success with pretty much every endeavor.
Nancy is also in a relationship that she loves. Her husband constantly brags to his friends about how great his wife is, how she surprises him with little gifts and how fun and active their sex life is, even after all these years. He knows that their relationship is a direct result of the two of them getting really clear on what each other wants and needs – and giving those things to each other. Through much trial and tribulation, they have learned that taking care of each other is the best way to take care of their relationship and, in-turn, themselves.
Nancy’s husband is grateful for his wife’s clear communication of her desires, despite them changing frequently. He loves this communication because he knows how hard she can be on him with when he doesn’t do what he said he would. Some might not like having such little slack, but for some reason he always feels loved when she’s tough with him in this way.
Nancy leaves her smart phone in her office at night and doesn’t check it until after she has finished her very consistent morning routine. She starts her day sat in silence, following her breath and watching what arises in her mind. She finds the more regular she is with this, she more able she is to see the illusory nature of reality throughout the day and the more she is able to embrace whatever seems to be occurring. Once her mind is still, she asks herself what she would love to create that day and then spends some time visualizing it. After meditating, she journals what she is grateful for and considers how she will express this gratitude throughout the day. After this, she typically goes for a run or to a yoga class and then has a nice breakfast.
Her first meetings are never before 10am, so she always has time for her morning routine. This structure is noted in her email footer and on her voicemail, so it is very rare that anyone even asks her for a meeting before 10am. When someone does though, she consistently and lovingly declines: “I’m so sorry, but I begin taking meetings at 10am.”
What is She Seeing?
Nancy can not only SEE the distinction ‘Allow Everything, Accommodate Very Little’, but she has fully EMBODIED it too. She is a living example of it.
Similar to Susan, Nancy’s success is a result of the certainty and commitment she creates, but different from Susan in that where Susan’s boldness comes from a fear of loss, Nancy’s comes from a love for possibility. She has a relaxed knowing of what’s true for her and she stands for that.
Similar to Clara, there is no fight in Nancy, only love. By moving through the world without her guard up, nobody she meets wants to fight with her and so it is rare that she ever ends up in an argument over anything. If one does begin to arise – because people do often want to argue in business – she smiles, takes a step back and reminds herself that whatever happens is OK with her. Different to Clara here though is that after returning to a foundation of peace and embracing ‘what is’, just like in her morning meditation, she then asks herself what she would love to create with this person. When she knows the answer, she returns to the conversation speaking for that in the same way she does with her husband.
Nancy is grounded in the knowing that whatever happens out there is completely OK with her (because none of it is real anyway) AND that by speaking from and for that which she would most love (which she knows through an open and loving heart) she is empowered to create that which is the greatest expression of her. In her experience too, what she creates from that place – in her body, in her relationship, in her business and everywhere in her life – is always the most beautiful result she could create and is what always ends up serving people the most.
Nancy is a shining example of someone who ‘allows everything’ in that she has little to no internal resistance to whatever appears to be occurring in her world.
At the same time, Nancy is also a shining example of someone who ‘accommodates very little’ in that by knowing what she would most love and standing firmly for that in all areas of her life, she leaves little of her personal space and time for use by other people in ways that are incoherent with her truth.
Nancy lives at the intersect of truth and love in a way that liberates remarkable freedom and power as a Creator.
Let’s all be more like Nancy.
