Forget Results

Yesterday I had a delicious Sunday. I chilled out completely, meditated, allowed my apartment to organize itself and most importantly – let myself off the hook. That’s a scary thing to do here – in America, because the collective vibe here is that if you are doing nothing, you are lazy.

Partying with friends is not relaxation. Obsessing about career is not relaxation. Feeling that things need to get done is not relaxation. There is still an agenda, still a carrot in front of you, a tightness in the chest. To simply let things be, be totally completely happy with them as they are, be at peace and to breathe deep – is relaxation, or at least the beginning.

Relaxation is not easy to get to if you are wound tight. It’s like the transition from ice to steam. You can’t go right from ice to steam- first the water needs to melt and then get to room temperature. Then it needs to heat and eventually get to a boil.

So if we want to relax, we need to allow ourselves the transition time and we need to practice making these transitions within. The better we get, the more practiced the relaxed state is, and we can get there more quickly and easily. Meditation, breathing deeper, appreciating life – all help one to relax.

Something triggered a memory yesterday of something my mentor taught me, something I had forgotten. This thought enabled further relaxation so I thought I’d share it with you here.

“Don’t look for results” he’d tell me, as I tackled new musical territory. “Just put the time in”.

I needed to remember this because I found that I was looking at certain aspects of my music career with an urgency. Yesterday I had an agenda of who I needed to send materials to, gigs I needed to get, nervousness about survival – essentially I had all the necessary ingredients to ruin a perfectly great Sunday!

And then, I heard “Don’t look for results” in my mind and thought about it. When you look for results, you never get the full joy of participating in what you are actually doing because part of the awareness is looking to keep score, to see if there is a payoff.

This is akin to planting a seed and looking every 5 minutes to see if it is growing. Does a seed start growing 5 minutes after it’s planted? On some level it does. But isn’t it nicer to forget about it and be surprised by the flower that blooms out of it?

With enough practice a gardner knows full well that the seed will grow into a flower. Can we operate in our lives with that same confidence? Can we believe something before we seee it?

Why not try?

All at once yesterday, it came to me. “How could my dreams NOT manifest? They always have. I have dreamt and accomplished so much…surely the new aspirations will bloom by themselves, just as the old ones have.”

And I am not pouring pink paint over this for the sake of a good blog entry. It was true. I saw that there is no way that they won’t happen. Can I wait and be patient? Yes. Can I savor the journey? Yes.

Most importantly, the relaxed delicious journey is the goal itself. Your relaxed delicious journey is the goal itself. The manifestation of one’s dreams is nice too, but the experience of creating and knowing that your “flower will grow” is the joy of life.

Looking for the seed to sprout, the impatience involved, the anxiety that it might not grow, the digging it up – is all resistance. To know deeply that the flower is on it’s way and not look for it is the delicious “art of allowing”.

Simply allow your asking, your goals, your dreams – to appear in your life.