Change: Do Or Do Not

Copyright © 2009 Lif C. Strand
www.spiritualhorsemanship.com


In one of the Star Wars movies, the Jedi Yoda says to Luke Skywalker: "Do, or do not - there is no try." I've always liked that statement. It's subtle and mind boggling - it is the absolute difference between progress and frustration, between happiness and stagnation.

Trying vs. doing is the difference between staying the same and becoming a new person, one that didn't exist even a moment before. It's about creating true change in your life

Doing is what makes intention become manifestation - really, it's the heart of the Law of Attraction.

As a friend once said about this whole the Law of Attraction thing (conscious, self-directed change): It’s simple, but it isn’t easy.

Of course change is simple – it happens all the time. We do it from the moment we’re conceived. Growth itself is change. We aren’t the person we were when we were born, or yesterday or even a nano-second ago, and we won’t be the same person as we are this moment ever again: cells have been created and cells have died; air has been breathed and gasses exchanged; thoughts have been thought, emotions felt; time has passed and all that is over with. However, most all of that change comes about automatically – our subconscious does almost all the directing.

What those of us who are working with Spiritual Horsemanship and the Law of Attraction are really wanting to do is bring about change in a proactive, self-determined, on-purpose manner. We are looking to become the person we decide to be, not who we just end up being.

That’s the part that’s not so easy.


Try: Another word for not changing

What Yoda was saying was that trying isn’t the same as changing, because trying is the attempt, not the change itself. The more you try, the more you are not changing. Trying is a process, a struggle to achieve change. The problem with trying is that trying is not how on-purpose change comes about, because while you keep yourself in the state of trying, you cannot become something different.

When in the state of trying, you are holding on to who you were and are – generally this is due to fear. Consider the trapeze artist who is standing on a small platform high above the ground, holding on to the pole behind him as the trapeze swings towards him. He reaches forward to grab the trapeze but it is just out of reach. He can never grab hold of that trapeze and swing out and away into the sky as long as he is holding onto the safety of the pole. He has to let go of the bar and lean forward into space to grab the trapeze in order to fly.

Fear comes in many forms – panic, rage, fear, anxiety, nervousness, uneasiness - all degrees of the same thing (negative emotion). But please, get rid of any ideas you have that fear is a bad thing, since fear can in fact be a good thing – it’s a tool the limbic system uses to keep us alive. The mind can make amazing split-second calculations that we consciously are unaware of. A trapeze artist will feel it’s either right to grab or not grab at the trapeze – and those feelings better be right when the consequences are that he could end up splatted on the ground below, after all.

But what if the trapeze artist never feels it’s the right time to grab at the trapeze? He keeps reaching and reaching, but never committing to the grab, he never acts. He gets fired because his act is dull. He can’t pay his bills, he takes up drinking, his wife leaves him and takes the BMW, and he’s reduced to taking a desk job in order to survive. (No offense to office workers).

In other words, the trapeze artist, up there on the platform high above the ground, was stuck in trying. He wasn’t doing.

What was holding the trapeze artist back? What keeps you from making the changes you want? Why couldn’t Luke Skywalker get that darned spaceship out of the swamp muck?


Next: Limiting Beliefs