Growing Up

I am noticing how limiting beliefs and experiences are. I just realized that I have always believed that being a grown up meant that you could drink and smoke. Since I have neither smoked nor drank, I must never have grown up. Now I have a place of my own and am responsible for everything I do or incur.

Most people, I imagine, would go through this phase during college, or shortly after graduating. I was a member of a religious community since I was 19. I had much responsibility, but not, as it were, for my life. In this way, I felt that I had never grown up.

Until now. This means, according to my beliefs, that now I can drink and smoke. Fortunately, going down that path didn’t last long, but what about all my other beliefs, especially the unconscious ones? How are they limiting me, putting a box around what I think I can or will experience? And, how can I become aware of these limitations? Certainly not by more thinking! This is what I meditate on—expanding my mind, my heart, my awareness and my sacred space.

Hmm . . . It just struck me that I am imagining, even believing, that limitations are limiting! Robert Masters writes in his book “Spiritual Bypassing”: “Real freedom, however, is not about having no limitations; rather it is about finding liberation within—and also through—limitation (as when the apparent constraints of committed monogamous relationship actually enrich and deepen the relationship). Real freedom does not mind limitations and in fact is not limited by them.”

My daughter reminded me yesterday that the universe does not seek independence, rather interdependence. It is within the limitations, or shall I say boundaries, of relationships, that we learn to grow up, or outgrow our limiting beliefs.