Self-care Moments: Living in cycles

Hi, this is Anne Malatt with self-care moments and this is a moment on living in cycles.

We are raised and educated to live in a certain way, to think that life is a straight line and we are born at the start and we have to race to the finish and do as much as we can along the way and experience and accumulate whatever we can for ourselves and then we die and that is the end of it.

We think that we live a day in a linear way and move from one day to the next, leaving each one behind us as we go.

Whilst there is a physical reality to this, in terms of the passing of the hours of the day and the days of the week and the weeks and months and years, there is a deeper truth to the way we live.

In truth, we live in cycles. We live one day, over and over again, and everything comes with us as we go around and around the sun. The sun comes up on one day and sets on the same day and comes up again as we go around and we leave nothing behind, but bring it all with us until we learn the lessons we are here to learn.

If we were to consider this for a moment, how would this understanding inform the way we live our lives?

When we think we live one life in a straight line that has a beginning and an end, we may think that we have the right to do as we please, for if we only have one life we may as well make the most of it. We may seek out as much pleasure, entertainment, activity and indulgence as we can, trying to cram it all into this one linear life. We may try and accumulate as many possessions and experiences as we can, thinking that it is now or never and that it is every one for themselves. We may treat people and situations as expendable, thinking that our actions and their consequences can be left behind.

But we know this is not true. We know that our actions do have consequences and that we tend to repeat the same patterns and behaviours and have the same types of friends and partners with the same problems and the same kinds of work conflicts no matter who the person is, until we make changes in ourselves, in our attitudes and behaviours and our understandings of life and the way we are to live it. We like to think we are victims of life and our circumstances, but we know we are not.

When we start to realise that there is a cyclic, rhythmic nature to life, we begin to understand that we may have a part to play in everything that happens to us. We see that the way we are with people affects the way they are with us. We learn that the way we treat ourselves during the day affects the way we sleep at night which determines the quality we wake up in the next day and the way that day unfolds.

We start to see that if things are not resolved in one day, they carry over to the next day and the next day and the next, until we start to look at the root cause of the problem, the energy that underlies what we think, say and do.

We start to realise that we are energetic beings as well as physical and that there is an energy that determines the physical outplay of life.

And we start to feel that there are two types of energy – one that has us living life in a linear way, always doing things in search of recognition, acceptance and approval, and keeping us in constant motion. This is the energy of division, separation, competition, chaos, control and delay, which seems to run most of what happens here on planet earth. And then there is the energy of our Soul. This energy knows that we are all in essence equal, all one, and it impulses us to live life in a way that is not just for us, but for everyone, equally, and for the whole we live in. It does not ask anything of us, for it knows that we are already everything, that everything lives within us, and all we have to do is be willing to stop for a moment and be still, to start to reconnect to that quality of being that has been living inside us all along. This quality was present when we were born, when we lived in a cyclic, rhythmic way and it is always there, waiting for our return.

When we begin to align to the energy of our Soul, we start to consciously live life in cycles. These cycles are with us in every moment of every day … as we breathe in and breathe out, as we swing our arms with each footstep as we walk, as we move and are still, as we work and we rest, as we wake and then sleep … and every movement we make becomes part of grander and grander cycles … the cycles of the day, of the moon, of the seasons, of the year, of the grander cycles of the constellations and beyond as we are moved through the universe together…

When we live life in cycles, we are not limited to linear time, for we live in space, where each day is the one day and our life is part of a grand oneness which also lives in cycles.