On being overly significant
Submitted by kurt.stewart on Mon, 03/08/2010 - 18:41
Sometimes we can’t help it – we get caught up in our lives, wound up about issues, work, relationships and a thousand little things that build up throughout the day. And we can get weighed down by it all. Maybe we take ourselves a little too seriously sometimes too.
We talk about this in one of our coaching tools called “Lightness v. Significance”. We look at what happens when we become “significant”- and some ways to shift our perspective to a lighter, more positive one.
What is Significance? Here is a Buddhist tale that illustrates what happens when we become overly significant.
A young monk was traveling with an older monk. Along the way, they came to a stream where a beautiful woman was standing, afraid to cross. Without hesitating, the old monk picked her up, carried her over the water and placed her down safely on the other side. The young monk was shocked but said nothing. They walked on until they reached their destination. Finally, the young monk, who was so disturbed by what he had seen, could hold back no longer.
“Why,” he asked angrily, “ did you carry that young woman across the stream. We monks have rules – it is forbidden to touch women!”
The young monk was carrying his Significance – a trunk load of fixed ideas about what is right and wrong, true and false. His significance blinded him to the reality of the moment. A woman needed help, and the older monk responded to his own humanity. His Lightness in the moment freed him from judgment and allowed him to act spontaneously.
We become significant when we bring our baggage to a situation. We carry it around, weighing ourselves down with beliefs, notions and learned behaviours. That “unobserved mind” puts us on auto-pilot and its gravity keeps us from soaring to a higher vantage point. Significance shows up most often when we are attached to our outcomes. Ask yourself, when engaging in any exchange, “What am I attached to here? What baggage am I bringing to this conversation that is weighing me down?”
So how do we bring about lightness in our life? The first step is to want to. To do this requires observing where you are significant in your life. Awareness is the first step to change. Identifying that you see the world in a negative way is an important moment. You can make a choice as to whether you see the world in a positive or negative way. You do not need wealth, or anything else to do this. It is within you to make this shift – not outside of you. We have all observed people who have had the most horrendous things occur to them and yet they are still positive. This is a state of mind – a state of being. The older monk shows us that we can be present to the moment. Bring lightness to your actions whenever you can. Life is way too short to be carrying around all that weight. (parts excerpted from the soon-to-be published book, This v. That – Change how you see your world, by Bronwyn Bowery-Ireland, ICA/Lobii CEO)
