Your life is not about you
If you are already familiar with the “Conversations with God” material, more than likely you have one or two insights or messages contained within the Cosmology that are especially meaningful to you, something that, when you first heard it, resonated with such clarity and fullness that it caused a noticeable and significant shift in your life.
For me, one of the most profound concepts to flow out of the “Conversations with God” messages is the following:
Your life is not about you. Rather, your life is about those whose lives you touch.
I remember the exact moment these words came into my life. I recall the precise instant when everything I thought to be true until that point was turned upside down. I was attending a “When Everything Changes, Change Everything” retreat in 2007, sitting in a dimly lit room along with 75 other people from around the world, when I first heard these exact words: Your life is not about you.
Well, if my life was not about me, then what IS it about?
If my life was, rather, about those whose lives I touch, then what does that mean for me? There has got to be something in it for me in the whole and sometimes messy scheme of things, right? After all, aren’t I the one doing the heavy lifting in my life here? Again, still having a hard time completely accepting the “not about me” aspect in all of this.
But while my mind was twisting itself into pretzels, trying to make sense of this completely new ideology that was just introduced to me, the next words flowed into my life:
You see, there is only one of us in the room. So what you do for another, you do for yourself. What you do for yourself, you do for another. And that is because we are all One.
And there it was, placed gently before me, the message which redefined the purpose of my life, the spiritual wisdom which altered the way I interact and enter into relationships with others. I had always proclaimed to embrace the concept of “we are all one,” at least on an intellectual or cognitive level. But my skewed vantage point thus far hadn’t allowed me to know this experientially nearly as often or completely as I would have liked.
Life feels harder and more external to us when we are simply each out to get our own, when we place expectations upon what we think we deserve. On the other hand, haven’t we all experienced the perfection of a truly selfless gesture towards another? The pure joy and quiet bliss of being of service to someone in need, without expectation of anything in return? Aren’t these instances of “not about me-ness” the ones that propel us into our own greatness, demonstrating to us all that there is no faster way to have something in your life than just simply going out and choosing to be it?
Oh, boy, do I still have days where I think life is all about me. I have plenty of them. I have moments when I question everything I believe to be true. There are times when I cross paths with people who I am convinced are not only separate from me but I am quite certain they are working in direct contradiction to me, motivated by an entirely different energy source than the one I am fueled by, even though at the highest level of awareness I know that is simply not true.
But these are the gifts that life is consistently presenting to me, the golden nuggets of opportunity that surround me, even though I may not be able to readily see them and might even find myself resisting them. These are the moments when I get to decide who I really am. These are the times when I get to ask and answer some important questions: Why am I here, right here, right now, at this exact moment in time? Who is it I am here with and for? Who might life be calling upon me to be?
These are the instances when I remember…my life is not about me.
(Lisa McCormack is the Managing Editor & Administrator of The Global Conversation. She is also a member of the Spiritual Helper team at www.ChangingChange.net, a website offering emotional and spiritual support. To connect with Lisa, please e-mail her at Lisa@TheGlobalConversation.com.)
