Cascading Persistence and Resilience

I remember the first time I saw a large waterfall. I was nine years old on a trip with my parents to Niagara Falls. The flow of the river, the cascading water, the mist, the roar, the whole environment was filled with the presence of nature’s power. The river continuously flows on with persistence and over time wears away everything that resists it. The water’s fluid movement creates it’s resilience as it changes to every contour it meets. Today this and other cascading energies point to a movement of the ongoing flow of growth and change.

Over the many decades of living in Colorado and the West, I’ve continued to experience the persistence and resilience of water, wind, rain, heat, cold, ice, snow and all other natural movements in the life giving rhythms of growth and change. This is natures way. As a collective however, we humans gravitate to the safety of what has been rather than what can be. We hide within our own culturally conditioned tribes and persist in what we’ve already outgrown while ignoring what wants to be. Our collective fears from the past color the present and future.

We all swim in a vast ocean of human beliefs, ideas and practices which permeate and influence our everyday lives. In the rapidly moving river of life we’re presently in, there are necessary course corrections we resist. As beliefs and behaviors outlive their shelf life they need to be discarded and replaced. The inner resilience of our innate pulse toward greater awareness and expansion is necessary to counter this persistent obsolescence. Hmm. . .

Vishen Lakhiani, founder of Mindvalley coined a new word that’s appropriate for this discussion:  Brules – the Bulls**t rules we adopt to simplify our understandings of the world. Some of the Brules I was raised with that took decades to separate from were: Children are not to question authority….are to be seen not heard….are not to think for themselves….are to be punished at the whim of authorities…are not to think of themselves as special, unique or too creative…God is Big Daddy in the sky and is always on our side. The point is that we can change the Brules.

What are some of the Brules you were raised with; that still have a hold on you? These Brules come from our parents, family systems, ethnic origins, schools, churches, governments, businesses, cultures, advertisers and countless places from the distant and not so distant past. I find it curious that our schools are still teaching as if we were in the industrial revolution rather than in the technological, psycho-spiritual, cultural, and political revolutions were now in. What’s up with this? What keeps us silent? Isn’t it time to move into new ways of Being?

Yes, there’s a cascading persistence in the old outdated understandings raining down upon us as well as the new updated understandings that keep drawing us further on into our upward call. There’s also the inner resilience to listen to the greater cascading inner pulse toward greater empowerment, inspiration, creativity, wisdom, reverence, interconnectivity, love, peace,  joy and enlightenment. What are you choosing? What are you letting go of to let come?

• Sit quietly and reflect on the many Brules you are now questioning and the ones you still don’t feel you can. Write in your journal what you experience and what this exercise reveals to you.
• What keeps cascading upon you as you observe your life? How receptive are you to this?
• What might change for you if you upgraded one Brule you’ve identified, starting now?