https://www.voicenotes.com/s/G7V9SM
Given that you are a human being living in the world, challenges at various scales and intensities and levels of severity are always there. They are actually the potential of learning embodied into the wall of resistance. What that means is, no one stops you from going, or trying to go, beyond your limitation—physical limitation, psychological limitation, environmental limitations, and so on. What stops you from trying is your idea that it doesn't worth the risk, or the effort, or the time, or anything else. To the extent that you do cross that limitation, to that extent the challenge itself provides you with the ingredients, with the nutrition, with the energy, with the guidance how to meet it. For otherwise it wouldn't be beyond the limitation that you perceive as limitation; it would just be a calculated investment in some effort. The beauty here is that you can allow yourself to fall, make mistakes, basically fail in crossing the limitation as long as you learn what is imagined and what is real. Because that learning is the crossing of the limitation. And it's so much boiled down to that, which is to distinguish between that which is imagined and that which is real, that the very movement toward crossing the limitation is one step from knowing to not knowing, from controlling to letting go, from reasoning and explaining to flowing as a movement of uncertainty. It's the difference between jumping to a lake and swimming to the other side, or jumping to a very strong river and just flowing with the stream. So that jump is the one thing that, as long as we are looking at it internally, that jump is the so-called reflex that prevents the learning. The fear of that jump, the limitation of jumping, because you don't know if it's a real limitation or if it's imagined. You don't know and you cannot know. But you can always learn. Learn that. Learn to sit with the challenge, with the invitation to accept the challenge, not by gambling, not by being reckless, not by just for the sake of adventure, but center the opportunity—or the opportunity is centered around a learning nuance of the everlasting question: what is real, what is imagined. Now, to make that practical, you look at your life now, as it is today, right now, and you pick a challenge that you feel is at the edge of calling you, yet you are avoiding it. It doesn't need to be big, it doesn't need to be important, it doesn't need to be—it could be so almost insignificant. And look at that from that lens: is it real? The barrier that prevents you, is it real or is it imagined? And here is the beautiful thing: you don't need to know. You need to question. If you truly question, you become that curious field, and that curious field invites the clarity that reveals what is imagined and what is real. And when the imagined is seen as imagined, you already crossed the barrier.
