The New Year is a good time to evaluate what you are doing with your life. Do you have fixed goals and purposes that you are trying to achieve, or are you just going with the flow?
The first thing to do is analyse your desires and where they come from. If your desires come from a place of your Ego – which means
Either they are sense based (for pleasure or out of pain)
They are aimed at proving yourself
They are meant to prove yourself to others
Or are incorrectly defined,
Then know that these desires are not your true desires.
These types of desires will make you control people, situations and life with the aim of achieving or the fear of not achieving. And when you control life, it loses its natural intelligence to provide what you really need. These types of desires are always polarised into pleasure or pain. Your chance of materialising such desires depend on what is higher – your pleasure or fear.
Being Vs Doing
Examine your desire. If you find it coming from a state of your being, in that it is rooted in your basic dharma or the purpose of your birth, then this desire will be supported by nature (prakriti) which will give it an immense push. This desire will aim to expand your potential. These kind of desires manifest very fluidly in your life.
“Going with the flow” means reacting positively to the challenges given by the Consciousness and evolving as per the situation, while steering yourself in the direction as per the flow.
When you “go with the flow” you find things happening magically around you, without any controls or push-and-pull. Know that you have taken birth with an intention – that you are more. And life supports that intention. As it flows it brings its own gifts.
Living as per your being makes life less stressful. It makes you live life joyfully and instead of running behind goals and targets, you go with the flow, steered by Life itself.
When someone asked Osho, what New Year resolution should we make?
Osho famously replied: “This and only this: I resolve never to make any resolutions because all resolutions are restrictions for the future. All resolutions are imprisonments. If you decide today for tomorrow, you have destroyed tomorrow.”
You must let tomorrow have its own entity. Let it come the way it wants and bring its gifts in its own way.
A resolutions means that you will allow only X and not allow Y. A resolution means that if you want the sun rising in the West, you will not allow it to rise from the east. With that mind set, if it does rise in the East, you will close your windows on the East, not allowing it into your house.
Making a resolution, Osho said, is a struggle of the Ego. A resolution declares that you cannot live spontaneously. And if you cannot live in the moment, you don’t live at all. You are only pretending.
“So let only one resolution be there: I will never make any resolutions. Drop all resolutions! Let life be a natural spontaneity. The only golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”
Thus when you go with the flow of life, you are joyful and beautiful. You are your natural self. There is no impatience or anxiety to achieve any goals, targets and no fear of tomorrow because as you connect with your Being, you are fearless. You know that you can handle whatever life brings you.
