“Peace and Bandwidth Are Never Worth Compromising.”
Yesterday, we talked about the validity of your intuition.
We also talked about why that can be so unbelievably difficult to believe and stand in.
Today, we’re getting right into Reason #2 for why spiritual people struggle:
When life gets hard, they make shitty decisions.
While this statement is pretty self-explanatory, let’s talk about what we mean by a shitty decision.
In our central model at The Second Paradigm (The Levels of Clearance), we outline two stages of the spiritual journey that sound remarkably similar.
Anchored Being is where you make 95% of your life’s decisions from your intuition and soul truth.
Essential Radiance, which comes next, is where you make 100% of your decisions from your intuition and soul truth.
That 5% doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s quite possible to entirely derail your life in Anchored Being in a way that just doesn’t happen in Essential Radiance.
Why?
Because when life gets hard, we get scrappy.
Nobody makes frantic decisions when they’re at peace with their lives.
But what if you have a bill to be paid in 2 weeks and the money isn’t there?
What if you go to sleep feeling lonely and wake up the next day with a text from your ex?
What if you eat 1000 calories worth of chips and ice cream and wake up feeling like you got hit by a truck?
Add a little discomfort to the mix, and almost everybody makes frantic decisions.
Quick cash, quick connection, quick health fixes—the Internet is full of offers to solve these “problems.”
But we only ever look for those “solutions” when we feel like we have no other choice.
Often, we don’t even think they’re going to work.
We know exactly what we’re getting ourselves into—a mess—and we do it anyway.
Why?
Because when life gets hard, even the most terrible decisions start sounding better and better.
We just want that feeling to go away.
To help make this clear, here’s a metaphor from David that he thinks is genius… and Miriam thinks is a bit silly.
Either way, we hope it helps.
David grew up in Tucson, Arizona.
When he was a kid, he went outside to build a 3” miniature snowman in half an inch of snow, because… well, it never really got cold there.
Fast-forward to 2018, and his toes are turning purple in 30 degree weather in Massachusetts.
For the longest time, David had no idea how to dress for winter. More than anything, he couldn’t get through his head how to keep his hands and feet warm.
He bought socks so thick his shoes hardly fit, and his feet would still get cold.
“Ah, maybe it’s because I’m so tall and thin,” he’d say.
Just a few weeks ago, he saw a vest at a local thrift store.
It was unusually high quality, and he loved it. But for the life of him, he couldn’t understand why anyone in their right mind would wear a vest.
“You should get it!” Miriam said.
“Could a piece of clothing be any less practical?” he thought. “It doesn’t even cover your arms!”
But being priced so unusually low, and loving the look of it, he bought it anyway.
Then came the snow.
That week, we went for a walk at a local conservation forest.
Miriam was bundled up in her winter coat with a thick winter hat, and David had on a coat—but it didn’t have a hood, and he didn’t bring a hat.
20 minutes in, David had to cut the walk short and get back to the car as quickly as possible because he was shivering and starting to feel a little dizzy.
“Should have worn thicker socks!” 😅
Christmas rolls around and Miriam’s mom buys David a red LL Bean hat.
That week, David spends some time outside wearing his new winter hat and his silly impractical vest, when he realizes something.
His hands and feet aren’t cold.
It takes a minute to fully register, but during his third real winter, he finally realizes what’s been happening.
He was so focused on his hands and feet, that he never stopped to think what else might be happening. Meanwhile, his core body temperature was falling, and his body was redirecting its warmth.
For the first time in this desert baby’s life, he understood the value of a vest and a hat.
The problem wasn’t his hands or feet. The problem was his chest and head.
If he only understood what was happening sooner, he could have protected his head and chest from the cold and not worry so much about uncomfortably thick socks.
Okay, where are we going with this?
As Miriam taps her foot, waiting for this silly story to be over, David’s getting ready to drop some “profound wisdom!”
At The Second Paradigm, we talk a lot about Peace and bandwidth.
But it’s not what most people are looking for.
They’re looking for the quick fix to a quick problem—they’re looking for a pair of thick socks to keep their feet warm.
But life isn’t about the quick fixes. Often, the real issue runs much deeper.
When most people hear us talk about “Peace,” they don’t think much of it—just like David didn’t think much of a vest.
What does Peace have to do with paying my bills this month, finding a romantic connection, or getting my health protocols back on track?
But, truthfully, Peace has everything to do with those things.
When we’re not in an emotional neutral place, we tend to make really bad decisions.
We end up sacrificing our soul for quick cash, texting our ex, and buying the latest health program that promises a sexy beach body by summertime.
We end up out in the cold with thick socks, and nothing to protect our core body temperature.
But if we stop and think about it—really think—most of the time, we don’t really need “thick socks.”
There’s a time and place for them, but life isn’t so frigid all the time.
On any given day, our lives tend to be a bit more… moderately cold.
We just haven’t learned to dress for the winter.
Maybe all we need is a vest and a hat.
Maybe all we need is our Peace and some bandwidth to make clear soul-aligned decisions in our lives.
Now before David takes this metaphor way too far…
“Peace is the vest, and our bandwidth is the hat! Get it? …Get it?”
…let’s get back to the point here.
When life gets hard, all we want to do is relieve the tension.
But isn’t that always the very moment we lose ourselves?
It’s the moment we take that crappy job just to pay the bills, even though we know there’s another way.
We can feel, even before it happens, that it’s nothing but a detour.
We’d go down that road, hit a dead end, turn back, and end up where we started.
We accomplish nothing but temporarily relieving an emotion, and end up wasting our remaining years on this planet to do what we actually came here to do.
Thankfully, there’s another way.
The difference between Anchored Being and Essential Radiance—that 5%—is the ability to feel the full weight of our emotions, and do…
Nothing.
What we find, every time, is the moment that emotional wave rolls through, we have clarity again.
It can be hours or days of riding that intense emotional rollercoaster, but it always ends.
And the moment it does, we realize we didn’t actually need some fancy solution.
We didn’t need to sell our soul and go out of alignment. There was always another way.
Divinity was there all along, guiding us through that process, and the path was already cleared for us.
All we had to do was ride out the uncertainty, feel the feelings, and avoid making those manic and frenzied decisions.
All we had to do was stay the course.
Because, like clockwork, when it actually came time to do something, we knew exactly what to do.
When it’s time, we always know.
Before that… we freak out.
No matter what it feels like, divinity has never abandoned us or refused to show us the way.
We’ve just made drastic decisions at the peak of emotional intensity… before we ever had the chance to get that intuitive guidance.
We took matters into our own (frantic) hands, before we ever got to see what else was possible.
When it comes down to it, we always have what we need to proceed.
When have you ever NOT known what to do, when the time was right?
Your intuition has been spot on, time and time again—it’s never failed you.
That means, the “urgency” is almost always just imagination.
Even when it isn’t and we’re faced with something truly urgent, when our emotions are spiking out of control, are we really capable of making a soul-aligned decision in that moment?
Our Peace and Bandwidth are worth protecting.
It’s the place within us that we source our soul’s guidance from.
It’s the space we need to sift through the noise and find true clarity.
What could be more important than that?
After all, most of the time, our life isn’t a frigid winter.
It’s just moderately cold, and we haven’t figured out how to navigate it yet.
Our hands and feet are freezing, and we can’t figure out what we’re doing wrong.
We get sold socks and gloves, every day of our lives.
“This is what you need!” they say.
But often, all we need to stay tethered to our intuition is… a vest and a hat.
That was Reason 2 in the Top 5 Reasons Spiritual People Struggle (and how to overcome them):
“They make shitty decisions when life gets hard.”
Next up, we’re getting into a big one:
“They try to fit in.” We’re going to explore relationships, unaligned friendships, and more—and why loneliness isn’t always a bad thing.
