“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads.
Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.”
Rosalia de Castro

This will likely be my last newsletter for a while. We are now preparing for our daughter to be born in November, and as a result I won’t have events in October (except the one at New Renaissance listed in today’s newsletter). I will continue to see clients through October, and then plan to suspend sessions for November and December. Depending on how life evolves with a newborn, I will start seeing clients again in January, yet it may be a while before I return to writing a newsletter and other things that fall into the management side of business.

Last month I promised a follow up article for addressing areas of life where unpleasant emotions have a deep hold. In trying to write it today I found myself feeling shallow and inauthentic, and I realized it’s because that’s not where my energy is. Right now all my energy and focus is on preparing for a change I can’t yet fathom, and the gaps in reality that emerge when the ego doesn’t know what to expect.

One of the ways the mind protects itself is by “knowing” things. It knows everything it felt in the past and so has a relatively good idea of what it will feel in the future. This is a key way we trap ourselves, as if we felt bad about something before we now use that feeling to imagine what the future will be like, and then take action based on that assumption. This is how we get lost in cycles of struggle. (Notice I talk about feelings here. The mind doesn’t think about feelings in imagining life, it thinks about events. Yet it construes memories of past events to fit how it feels, not what actually happened.)

Right now I’ve never had a baby before, so I don’t know many details of what it will be like and have no idea how it will feel on a daily basis. The result is I don’t have a sense projection of the future in the same way. My mind keeps trying to, and coming up empty so my unconscious effort to assume the future is now noticeable. Since I don’t know how it feels to have a baby, I can’t fill in the blanks.

The awareness that you don’t actually know the future or even what will happen today is a solvent for most of life’s ills. Last month I said imagine the future from a state of joy. Today I say if something in your life is such that you can’t imagine feeling joy, then embrace not knowing. Not knowing is perhaps the most liberating state to be in (and associated most with states of Enlightenment) because it is the most true.

We don’t actually know what will happen ever, and by allowing this truth to sink in the sense experience of old patterns and problems disappears. Not knowing can feel uncomfortable and scary, but when embraced it serves as a liberator. The next time you start to worry about something, simply add the phrase “and I don’t know” to the end of your sentence. This opens the door of possibilities, and stops the mind from running in circles.