Gerad Kite - Everything You Need You Have: How to Be at Home in Your Self

Home is where I want to be

But I guess Im already there.

TALKING HEADS

Being human can be tough. The gift of life is a miracle but it comes with complications and setbacks that many of us struggle to cope with. We know the goal is to be happy and fulfilled and there are many great examples of a successful life that we can compare with our own, or hold ourselves up to. There are those who appear to cruise through, seemingly having managed to get a hold of the secret life manualbut it doesnt take away the fact that life is challenging a lot of the time, and many of us simply dont know how to navigate our way through it. It begs the questionwhat is a successful life? Is it incremental? So that at the end of your days you can sit and calculate the great times vs. the bad times and see if you passed the test? What is life supposed to be? How on earth do we know if our life is going well?

The trouble is that when you ask one question, it just seems to beget another.

I have been working on a one-to-one basis with people for almost 30 years, first as a psychotherapist and then as a Five-Element acupuncturist; and it is in the nature of what I do that I come into contact with many people who are in trouble in some way. They may have suffered a trauma, a relationship breakdown or serious illness; or they may, after years of striving, simply have got to a point where their lives feel somehow empty and meaningless. Perhaps my job gives me a slightly colored view of the world, but I dont think so. Those life cruisers, with the manual? They, too, tend to run into problems at some point, the shiny veneer having concealed bottled-up worries which, like water finding its way through a tiny crack in a rock, will eventually manifest themselves, either as psychological difficulties or in the form of physical disease.

In our fast-paced, aspirational culture its accepted as normal for us to look endlessly outside ourselves for meaning and purposewhat can I get? Where will I be? In early life we look to our parents as role models; but as we, and they, get older, we realize that they dont really have the answersnor do our friends or the names in lights that were meant to look up to. In the meantime, we plunge ourselves into work, tasks and routines, our relationships, social life, hobbiesalmost anything as we look for ourselves.

Of course, we all want to do well, to get on. But all this looking ahead has the effect of keeping us in the thrall of a perpetual future: I just need to get away on holiday; when the kids have left home, when weve paid off the mortgage, we can really start enjoying ourselves; if only we didnt have this rain. And yet the truth is that when we do eventually get there, theres rarely any real sense of arrival, there are no flagsand, even if there are, the celebrations all too often short-lived as we jump to focus on the next best thing. If were not looking forward all the time, were lamenting or feeding off the pasteither in the form of nostalgia or of regretsthat bad love affair, the day we got sacked, or were tricked into that deal that lost us so much money

So, let me ask you: how often do you stop, and look inward and find yourself content with whats here and now? And how often do you hear someone else doing that: simply relishing the joy of the now?

Many people in the world today equate happiness with being busy or even mildly stressed; they say it makes them feel alive. But as we shall see, this thought is just part of a whole range of problems caused by how disconnected we have become from our true selves.

We put our faith and trust in the illusory future, and dont seem to wake up to the fact that this limited reality isnt the full picture and inevitably just doesnt deliver: that what were looking for simply isnt out there.