ANGELIQUE ELECTRA
Your Life is like a Sailboat
You are born into a ready sailboat captained by your parents. When you’re little, your parents steer and drive the sailboat, ensuring you are safe. They gradually allow you to become a shipmate, taking on small chores to launch the boat, and care for the boat when onshore. You notice how your parents thoughtfully use anchors and adjust the sails to best catch the wind. The waters and wind clearly affect the boat’s direction and speed, and your parents hold the reins, and steer accordingly…to help you to enjoy the ride, understand its workings, and most, of all, keep you safe. As you grow, you begin to take out your own sailfish boat, and allow yourself to be playful with the wind, never going too far out toward on the lake or away from the shore. There is much laughter as you occasionally fall into the water and fish yourself out.
Captaining Your Own Boat
Finally, the day comes when you get your own boat. You graduate from school and move out of the family home. What now? You remember all you can about what your parents and circle of relatives and teachers showed or taught you to navigate, but your heart and spirit are gallant and you really want to navigate your way. The wind feels in your favor, and the steering seems easy.
Then winds change, and waters get rough, and true captainship is necessary. More education, more mastery, more attention, care and thoughtfulness. It’s more complicated when the winds of conformity continue to be stronger than the direction you are striving for. You find that there is strategy in how to shift the direction and speed to accommodate the real world. It’s easy to get lost — you can lose the horizon from time to time. You learn to use and rely upon your compass, comprising your instincts and inner voice. When storms come, sometimes the shore is out of sight and mastery is necessary. Sometimes you’re ready for the storm; sometimes you are not.
Then sometimes, out of the blue, you find your boat is weighted down…something slows it, or even stops it mid-stream.
Sandbags!!
Where did they come from?
They are what hold us back or weigh us down…
Fear, lack of confidence, family problems, a major loss, that overbearing boss, the lost job or opportunity, or a drained bank account. Sandbags are hard to release when they are heavy and in deep water. To release them requires some conscious intention and presence to why they are there in the first place. Then once the method of release is evident, courage and faith fall into place as the boat grows lighter.
Releasing sandbags to better captain our boats
First, consider whether these sandbags are recurring issues. Play detective and try to ascertain whether the common denominator is you.
Are your own thoughts weighing you down or holding you back? Examine them. Write down your core beliefs and then interrogate them. Are they really true? What’s more true?
Are you giving control of your captain’s wheel to others? Are you no longer steering your life? Check your boundaries. Are you saying “yes” too often when you feel “no.” Is your helping others actually hurting you? Are you suppressing your voice or your needs to please others?
Are you weighed down by your tolerations? Are there conditions that take the wind our of your sails because you simply tolerate them. Consider making a list of all the things you are currently putting up with. Then, in a column next to each, put a number in from 1-10 to describe the relative degree to which the toleration negatively affects you or makes you feel(10 being the highest degree), and then pick up to 5 (at a time) to determine which ones to put an immediate focus upon. Then devise a plan with a timeline to address it. This can range from the closet you need to clean out to an irritating element of a relationship.
Are you battling with an addiction or a mental illness? You cannot sail by yourself. In that case, you will need an able crew to support you. Professionals who have sailed these rough waters countless times, and on whom you can lean on to ensure the wheel no longer slips from your hands. Your family and your friends stay onshore as your lighthouse and beacon, ever blinking light to welcome you.
Sandbags can also be those things that just happen to you — a pandemic, life threatening illness, loss of a family member, loss of a job, out of control adult children. a weather catastrophe, or the uninvited acts of other people. If that is the kind of sandbag you are carrying, then Life is calling on different captaining skills — resilience, determination, and most of all, a deep, abiding faith in something higher to guide you–your own North Star. It also means staying in the present, and taking one day at a time. It also means giving yourself grace every day.
Using Self Inquiry to Activate your Compass
You will get blown around in your boat, and it may be difficult to know where to go and what to do. You get the right answers by asking the right questions and surrendering to the answers your Inner Voice provides.
Your own questions to your own higher consciousness can probe what your blocks are, what you’re not seeing vs, what you think you are seeing, what is getting in the way, whether your own thoughts are causing you to run adrift. Getting quiet and seeking solutions from your Inner Voice means to simply float in surrender and let the rain of clarity fall upon you.
Then, clear sailing toward the horizon.
What are your Sandbags?