15. Easy Does It

If you’re like the rest of us, you were brought up to believe that life is hard. Guess what – IT IS.

If it hasn’t already, Life will challenge you in ways that you cannot begin to imagine. And yet…

Learning IS NOT Life!

How you apply yourself in learning to do whatever it is you wish to do better, needn’t be cause for struggle, or hardship, or pain.

In learning – Struggle is optional. In fact, struggle actually impedes learning.

Learning is the progeny of your nervous system. It’s what your nervous system does AND what it achieves. Your nervous system learns through experience. It is programmed to choose efficiency. But it can only choose from among the options you offer it.

If you insist on imposing struggle, excessive effort, discomfort, pain, etc. into the learning process, you give your nervous system no choice but to select from among choices that include the very things you find so disagreeable. In other words, your nervous system is forced to select the best of the worst.

When you do less, making your efforts and actions light, small, easy, joyful, YOU teach your nervous system that those possibilities exist AND you greatly increase the likelihood that you will learn to DO accordingly.

Your nervous system is designed to differentiate. Your senses are capable of distinguishing very small differences. But, and this is a very big BUT, distinguishing and differentiating are relative. If all you ever give yourself the opportunity to feel and experience is excessive effort, then that becomes the background against which your nervous system must distinguish. Because you are already trying very hard, you must work that much harder for your nervous system to perceive a difference. The proverbial push must come to shove in order for you to feel that something is different.

On the other hand, if you experiment with ease – small shifts, gentle actions – your nervous system plays along and over time learns to distinguish (i.e., notice) smaller and smaller changes. As your ability to perceive small changes becomes greater and greater, your nervous system becomes better able to differentiate (i.e., notice the difference between) the small changes. This, in turn, allows you to make smaller and smaller shifts leading to greater refinement in whatever it is you are learning to do. Without effort, you make the shift from impossibility to possibility, from possibility to ease, from ease to elegance. YOU. The possibility exists within YOU. IF you are willing to let go of overwork.

The take-away is this – In order to achieve, you don’t need to work so hard. You have the ability to teach yourself that struggle is indeed optional.

Letting go of excess effort makes you more efficient and efficiency releases you from the bondage of struggle. Ask yourself – Where am I working hard? Where is my desire to achieve causing me to do more than is necessary? Then allow yourself to do a little less.