“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” – Joseph Campbell
Yesterday in Part 1, we spoke about an insidious little trap we all fall into along the inner path:
Backsliding.
It’s that creeping impulse to take a few steps back every time we make a big leap forwards…
…To take our foot off the gas, slow down, mess around, and lose our progress as soon as real-world results begin to show.
In other words, we lose what we earned while celebrating the fact that we earned it.
Why?
Why do we keep fumbling the bag after working so hard for it?
In a word:
Homeostasis.
Like everything in nature, we want to grow — but like everything in nature, we also want to do it safely.
And growth isn’t always safe:
There are bigger, badder challenges at the next level — challenges that our highly-evolved survival system fights to protect us from.
(the lion at the top of the mountain faces the fiercest competition, and all that)
So an internal tug of war begins:
On one side, the part of us that wants to grow; to break free, evolve, and expand into the exciting unknown…
And on the other, the part of us that wants to stay safe; to huddle up in our zone of comfort where it’s cozy and familiar and it feels like nothing can hurt us.
If you’re committed to the growth game, that probably sounds frustrating.
And you might even be tempted to say — fv#% safety — push that pedal through the floor.
But let’s put ego aside, and remember:
Nature doesn’t make mistakes.
This internal braking system has been optimizing itself since we were single-celled organisms — and it knows what it’s doing.
It’s got a few billion years on us, and fighting against it is like playing checkers against a chess master:
We simply aren’t going to win.
The solution?
Stop fighting against it.
End the tug of war, and get both sides pulling for the same team so that smooth, perpetual growth becomes your natural way of being.
We’ll discuss how, tomorrow…
– T
