If memory serves me well, it was Stephen Stills who sang the song "Love the One You're With." The lyrics lay it out...."if you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with."
He's talking about a love relationship which most of us think of as being between two individuals, right?
See if this works for you.....consider that the relationship is between you and yourself. You being the pure and perfect spirit that is the background to all of your thinking and yourself as the thinking. The thinking believes that it is the boss and continually looks for gratification either in being right about something, being special for some reason or being miserable about something. Spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson refer to this idea in their work. The real you is the pure and perfect energy that is always present, the awareness or consciousness that is nurtured when we make a habit of inviting stillness, when we pray or meditate, when we're really present in the quiet.
When we invite stillness and grow in the awareness of a perfect present, where the thinking comes and goes without our attachment, we are on our way to living a more inspired life. It is in a way like growing a garden. First you plant the seed then you observe small changes until something beautiful arises from those small steps.
The concept of Inspiration In Action is to allow yourself to remove the barriers to an opening. Our thinking is pretty powerful and because we've been conditioned to believe that success is based on superficial criteria, our thinking mind has a hard time looking at the idea of personal satisfaction any other way.
Take body image as an example of how we manifest the false beliefs we hold on to. The fact of the matter is North America is suffering a epidemic of obesity. Would you ever know that if you based your knowledge on the images you see in magazines and other media? Like our thinking mind though, you can't win because the messages out there are undermining our wellbeing. We take in a lot of information about how we can't possibly measure up and devour information in advertising that does not have our best interest at heart and at the end of the day we are exhausted from trying to do the impossible.
The answer to this unending cycle of expectation and disappointment is to nurture the real you, the pure and perfect you. How we look on the outside can be deceiving because it's who we are inside that matters. Who we are on the inside is pure and perfect; when we begin to recognize the purity and perfection there is an opening and in that opening you will "love the one you're with."
Funny thing is that when you connect with the idea of allowing the purity and awareness of the perfection within you to grow, you'll no longer need to focus on the thinking that you always considered was in charge. In the presence of this awareness, you'll begin to appreciate that you are a spiritual being, having a human experience. While your body is an integral part of your experience it is not the everything of the experience. When we grow in spirit, we're free to accept exactly what is and in doing so, we begin to develop a peaceful feeling. It will grow on the inside and the beauty of that knowing will show on the outside.
