I was in the midst of watching my mind recently during a meditation. On this particular day, it was filled with an age-old, negative and scary storyline. As I watched what was being played out, I heard a profound question being posed to me: Do you know what you answer to?

And then, on the heels of that question I heard, Remember what you answer to. 

As you can imagine, this question and the statement of pure guidance that followed, pulled me out of the thought loop I had been caught in; sending me into a place of contemplation around what this all meant for me. How framing the thoughts I was having, through the lens of being aware of what I most want to answer to, feels immediate and profoundly life-changing. A direct way into choosing what it is I will give my attention to. A strong question and statement to help me remember some things I never want to forget.

A kind of True North in a world always pulling us away from what it is we most want to line up with when it comes to how we are choosing to live. When it comes to what we answer to, as demonstrated by what we believe in and act on.

In truth, harboring negative, unreal and untrue thoughts can only leave me forgetting what it is I answer to. Can only leave me answering to all the wrong things. Ever. Like other people’s opinions. Scary and inflated news headlines. Past conditioning. Destructive agendas. Old hurts. Stories passed down the line that were never mine to begin with.

It’s so easy to believe you are your thoughts. So easy to stay with what you have been given. So easy to fall into herd mentality. And so very, very much harder to fight it. To refuse to pick up what is not yours. To reject what it is that hurts you just by thinking about it.

This is not easy to do. There is so much momentum behind thinking the very thoughts that get us answering to the wrong things. There is a social pull that drags us into believing certain things, going along with the crowd if you will, even when it is not good for us. Then there is all the information we are being fire hosed with that we are not challenging the validity of, that frightens us and gets us believing things that are not true. There is also our own survival system that clings to what we have always done as a safety feature, making it difficult to release the so-called “tried and true” ways.

And finally, there is the “benefit” of letting something or someone else decide what you answer to; a kind of abdication of personal responsibility for being the decider of what you will allow to go on in your own mind.

In the Yogic tradition, there is a practice known as Neti, Neti. It translates to Not this. Not that. A powerful orientation of rejecting what is false. A practice of the mind to sort through all of life’s experiences through the process of elimination. Running every thought and behavior through the grist mill of, Nope it’s not that. That’s not it. Whatever the”it” means to you.

“It” could mean being out of alignment with your values. Or maybe your spiritual beliefs. It could be the kind person you most want to be. Or how it is you want to talk to others. Using this practice helps you so that even when you are not exactly sure how to get to what you answer to, there certainly are things you know you do not want to answer to.

If you want to begin, you must have a way of noticing what you are thinking about, and therefore, answering to. Learn to catch yourself thinking whenever you can. And when you find yourself in a loop that does not feel like something you want to answer to, say to yourself, No, not this. This is not what I answer to.

What I answer to is…

I was away last weekend co-facilitating a retreat in the mountains for women. There is just something so gratifying about being with people who have chosen to step out of their lives in the service of caring for themselves. So inspiring to watch what a small amount of time with ourselves can do for our perspective. So life-changing when we give ourselves the time to see ourselves in a different light.

And that’s why retreating from the day to day matters so much. With the space we need, we’re able to tap into what it is we never want to forget, but do. Given just a little time on our own though, free from the demands and the constant noise of it all, we can realign to who we are and to who we most want to be.

For me, it always boils down to forgetting or remembering. Forgetting or remembering what we need, why we’re here, what we value and what matters most in Life.

Which is why we need lots and lots of reminders every single day. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get pulled off course. Too easy to believe that the wrong things are the right things. Too easy to believe that someone else has the answer. Too easy to believe that what we feel doesn’t matter. Too easy to get lulled into the comfort and the distractions of all our modern day “conveniences.”

So like a true North Star, when we allow ourselves some time for ourselves, we create the opportunity to see things as they really are. From this reality-based place, the little course corrections we need to make each and every day to stay on track become more obvious. And doable. It’s so much more difficult (and scary) to make your way back to remembering when you have strayed a long distance from yourself and what it is you most need.

So why not make a point of spending time with yourself each day to help you remember what you never want to forget? It’s not difficult. It’s truly as easy as pausing in your day to notice if things are working for you or not. As easy as going to your breath to create a little more space within to know what to say or decide. As easy as saying the heartfelt prayer, Help me this day to remember, before you get out of bed in the morning.

I’m back from being away on vacation, so there’s lots to be done this week. The emails that need answering, loads of laundry, phone calls, weeding, harvesting, work-related projects and more.

As I’m setting up for my morning practice on the first day back, though it’s early, I already have a load of laundry going. So as I start to settle into meditation, I can hear the spin cycle on the washer humming away. The sound presses in on me; reminding me of all that needs doing. With this reminder comes a kind of tension to hurry up and “get things done.”

It makes it hard to settle in and to give myself this time. But then something occurs to me. The fix is obvious. All I have to do is to close the door between the spaces so that it’s easier to turn towards myself. Easier to settle into a time I count on to set myself straight. So simple.

But simple is not always easy. Especially in a world that loves to obfuscate and complicate what is most essential to us and to our lives here. Not to mention a mind that loves to list out all the reasons why we cannot possibly carve out time for ourselves and the deeper experiences of Life.

All of this is noise. Pure and simple. Life-depleting, soul-sucking noise. If it weren’t so devastating, it might be funny how absolutely ineffectual we can be when it comes to carving out time for ourselves. But it’s not funny because of how many of us don’t have a clue about what is being lost.

Without time on our own, without the space to have a thought free of what’s coming across a screen, without the room to get clear about whether or not your life is working for you, you will be taken down the wrong road. Every single time. This will leave you with no other option than to agree to and settle for all the wrong things. A kind of saying “Yes” by default to those things in Life without meaning or substance.

Time on your own, free from what the world demands of you is not a luxury. It is foundational and non-negotiable if you have any hope of hearing what your body is telling you, along with the call of your own soul. It is an inner demand if you have any chance of making daily choices that line up with what you value most.

Making time for yourself regularly is the antidote to succumbing to the madness and the falsehoods of a world intent on distracting you from yourself. Ready for something else? Learn to close some door every single day to give yourself the chance to hear how things are going and you just might find yourself spending some of the most satisfying and course-correcting time you will spend all day.

My yoga teacher would often talk of the spiritual path as a great battle, and how there was a far greater peace to be had on the other side of that battle. What he meant of course, was the value in meeting our challenges head on. That rather then collapsing in defeat, or trying to sidestep whatever was in front of us, we instead go heads up and bravely towards that battle. That we go right through the center of it, until we come out on the other side.

The image of a battle is frightening. It’s bloody. There’s collateral damage. It is unlike the civility of every day life. Though you want a particular outcome, there is no guarantee. And you never know what will be asked of you.

No wonder so many of us could never imagine going straight through anything that intense or unpredictable. More to the point, that potentially deadly. No wonder we would want to fall down. Or slink away. The problem being, if we do that, the battle still rages on. Only now we are at the mercy of something that will have its way with us whether we participate or not.

The battle to which I refer is the call of your own soul and the fight for your own sovereignty and authenticity. This formidable call from within is hard to answer in a world that pushes for the inauthentic where we are taught to people-please, diminish our own light and medicate ourselves into oblivion. The greatness that resides within being kept from the very difficult challenges it requires to emerge intact.

When we refuse the call of meeting our lives head on, we never develop the skills to be with what is difficult. This sets up a domino effect of more avoidance on our part of what is hard, which then means we actually cannot meet the next hardness that comes our way with anything but fear and anxiety. This sets up more exaggerated beliefs that it’s all too difficult, and that we just don’t have it in us; leaving us alienated from the very thing we most yearn for.

The good news is, this is precisely where we begin. Right at that place in our life that feels like a battleground we are not capable of meeting. Only, this time, instead of turning away, we run towards it. We say to ourselves, “I see you and I honor you as the honing I require to emerge fully myself.”

Maybe this means sitting for one minute, or even ten seconds, with an uncomfortable feeling before you distract yourself or project it onto another. And then, you build from there. Before you know it, after many, many moments like this, you have taught yourself how to be brave and how to stand in your place when the going gets tough. Before you know it, what used to feel like more than you could do, is now something that strengthens you.

This is where the courage of the warrior is born. The one who can be with what is frightening. The one who can step out of their comfort zone, by allowing what needs to die to go in order to re-imagine their life outside of the limited view of themselves they have been given. The one who asks for nothing other than to know the truth of who they are and why they are here.

“This is nothing I ever wanted, and everything I ever needed.”

This phrase drops in recently in the midst of a roller coaster ride inside my own mind in response to the outer circumstances happening in my life. In case you haven’t already gathered, I didn’t want what was happening to be happening. But it was. Hearing these words softened the experience though; reminding me I do not always know what is best for me. But that the Universe does.

On this particular day, I had the grace to see the blessing that was being offered to me, despite experiencing something I did not want. Of course, it hasn’t been like that every day. Some days, I am like a fish on a line; fighting against “what is” with every ounce of strength I have.

And therein lies the suffering. The misery. The struggle. And the blame. All centered around the fact that things are not other than what they are. That life and other people are not doing what I want them to do. Or to be.

We all know this place. We all know the internal battle that gets waged when we do not want what is happening to be happening. Maybe it’s an illness. Or the ways of the world. Or a relationship not working out. It can be any manner of things. And if we’re paying attention, we can find examples in our lives large and small, of all the things we do not want to be happening, but that are. Of the nearly continuous stream of suffering we experience daily over all the things we want to be other than as they are.

Like the weather. Or the traffic. Or what someone else is doing, believing or saying. On and on it goes. We make the mistake that our suffering will end when that thing or that person outside of us is different. Or goes away. Or just somehow lines up with our version. We can spend our lives like this. Victimized by what is outside of us. Hoping, praying, pushing, cajoling, fighting. All in an effort to get Life to line up with our very own narrative.

But if we were willing to wise up, we would see that it has never worked out. That even when we feel as though it has worked in one situation, another will arise in its place that will not respond to our efforts. It stands to reason then, that we need another way. Another approach to being in a world that will always being doing something other than what we want it to be doing.

Best I have come up with is something I once heard. “This is not being done against you, it’s being done for you.” What if we took that attitude? Of course, it would mean we would have to own up to the fact we do not always know what is best for us. That we cannot see the larger picture to know how what is happening is somehow perfect for us.

Meaning? A whole lot of surrender. A deep and abiding trust that we are are part of Something Greater. And a willingness to shift our perception away from fighting “what is,” and instead, learn to say “Yes” to What Is.